“I wish you hadn’t gone out last evening,” said my wife.

I looked at her with the innocent expression husbands have perfected over centuries.

“Yesterday evening?” I asked, buying three valuable seconds.

“Yes,” she said. “Yesterday evening. Where were you?”

“I was thinking about a new book,” I replied.

“Where?”

Before I could construct a respectable answer, my phone volunteered.

“You visited Royal Garden Restaurant from 7.12 pm to 9.03 pm,” it announced through its location history.

My wife looked at me.

I looked at my phone.

The phone looked pleased with itself.

“I can explain,” I said.

My phone immediately displayed photographs of the restaurant, the bill, the route I had taken and an advertisement offering me twenty percent off my next meal there.

My wife folded her arms.

“Who was with you?”

Fortunately, my phone could not answer that.

Then facial recognition identified the three friends sitting around the table, one looking slightly red, as if he’d had one too many.

There are no secrets in marriage anymore. Not because husbands have become more honest, but because phones have become government witnesses.

My phone knows everything about me. It knows where I go, what I buy, what I read and how long I stare at videos of people falling into swimming pools.

It knows when I wake up because I reach for it before reaching for my spectacles. It knows when I sleep because it is the last face I see at night.

Sometimes it even knows what I want before I do.

Yesterday, I whispered to my wife, “Perhaps we should buy a new sofa.”

Within minutes, my phone showed me forty sofas, twelve furniture shops and a man explaining why my present sofa was destroying my spine.

I had not searched for a sofa. I had merely spoken about one.

I now speak softly near my phone.

I am afraid that if I say, “I feel tired,” it will book me into a hospital.

We fear artificial intelligence taking over the world, but we carry its chief spy in our pockets. It reads our messages, finishes our sentences, corrects our spelling and reminds us of birthdays we would otherwise forget.

My wife sometimes asks, “Do you remember what I told you this morning?”

I do not.

But my phone remembers what I searched for nine years ago.

That is the tragedy. Our machines are remembering more while we are remembering less. We know the battery percentage of our phones, but not the worries troubling the person beside us.

Perhaps we should occasionally put the phone down and look around. There may be someone waiting to speak, smile or hold our hand. And unlike our phones, they may not remember everything we did wrong.

But they will certainly remember that we were there with them..!

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