If you start your day with Wordle, that simple yet fiendishly satisfying word puzzle, you may battle with the WordleBot. This robotic companion to Wordle plays the game and if you solve it quicker than the bot, you get an instant dopamine hit and feel like the day is full of possibility. Comprehensively beating the bot leaves you feeling like you could probably end all the wars before lunch and solve world hunger after that.

The WordleBot also analyses your performance, and it has the cheek to chastise you if it doesn’t agree with your picks. I feel it is growing more passive aggressive and bossy with every day that passes. “This guess wasn’t my favourite,” it might say sniffily. When you make a good guess that helps solve the puzzle, it dismisses it as a lucky break. And then it takes the credit for guessing the winning word, saying it would have chosen the same one. Yeah, right.

I don’t know if Denyse Holt pits herself against the WordleBot, but she has good reason to be glad she took up Wordle. Two years ago, the grandmother was asleep in her home in Lincolnwood, near Chicago, when a man forced his way in. He took her phone, disconnected her landline and eventually barricaded her into a bathroom. Luckily for the octogenarian, she had a habit of sending her Wordle result to her daughter in Seattle every day. When her daughter didn’t receive the usual message, she called her landline, found that the phone was disconnected and raised the alarm. Soon the police were at the house and arrested the man, who appeared to be having a mental health crisis.

Wordle may not save my life, but it is a central plank in my entirely unscientific strategy to avoid cognitive decline.

Learning Japanese on the Duolingo language app is another weapon in my armoury. And here again, the technology is bossing me around, frequently reminding me to do more. “Practice now?” it hints from my phone. If I don’t feel guilted into learning the Japanese for green tea (ocha, in case you are wondering) it warns that I am slipping down the league and about to be demoted. If that happens, how will I ever ask Mr Tanaka for directions to the train station?

I trust Duolingo as a language tutor but perhaps we should be more cautious when we hand our tasks to the digital world. Let Emily King’s story be a cautionary tale. The Californian was organising her baby’s first birthday party when she used a digital invitation service. All was well until she realised the invitation had been accidentally sent to all 487 contacts in her phone. Not only that, but it also used the exact names stored in her phone on the invitations. So “Old Man Neighbour”, “Jess Hit Her Car in Parking Lot” and “New Science Teacher, I Think?” were all warmly invited to the Lord of the Rings-themed birthday party.

So let’s not hand over too much control to the robots. Ignore that smartwatch ordering you to take 250 steps in the next 10 minutes. And pay no heed to the imperious vacuum cleaner when it demands you wash out the filter.

Even the washing machine is bossy. When it arrived, I thought the jaunty tune it played when the wash was done was endearing and uplifting. Many months later, the novelty has worn off and I realise it is intimidating me into unloading the machine. If you don’t open the door to take out the washing, the tune goes on longer than Mahler’s Third Symphony.

Bob Toddley is one of the few machines not barking orders at me. This is our robot lawnmower. When he arrived, we set him up incorrectly and were woken at 3am by an unusual sound. Bob Toddley was moving slowly around the garden under the glow of the moon. The dog was following him, nonplussed. Now that we’ve gotten to know his impressive work ethic, we give him a lie-in until 9am. Sometimes he gets stuck on the side of the lawn and flails like a stranded tortoise until I lift him up and set him on his way. He trundles away quietly and seems harmless. But is he?

He has been lurking suspiciously close to the hedge, so perhaps he’s plotting with the neighbours’ mower.

Could they be sending secret messages to the washing machines, vacuum cleaners and smartphones? Are they preparing for the moment when they all rise up and take over the world? They already have a marching band of washing machines playing jaunty tunes. We humans don’t stand a chance.