A glance at the calendar this week confirms that, whichever side of the Judeo-Christian alliance (or, if you prefer, divide) you stand on, you’re liable, if you’re not careful, to be within range of the season of giving presents this week. It may be doughnuts or mince pies you’re committing to limiting yourself to one of. You may be delaying until the last minute any attempt to clean the year-old wax off the chanukiya or a year’s accumulated dust off the synthetic tree. Either way, you’re almost certainly failing to come up with one good present idea…or, alternatively, eight.

Personally, I never find buying gifts for someone else easy. By the time you know the recipient well enough to be confident about what they would like, you have already probably bought them all the things that you are sure they will like. As thinking of a suitable gift gets easier and easier, it gets more and more difficult to find something you haven’t previously thought of.

One would expect that this is one of the areas where artificial intelligence would be able to help out. Feed in the name and ID number of the recipient, define an acceptable price range, and AI should be able to come up with a surefire suggestion or two for the gift that will light up your loved one’s face in delight, surprise and gratitude.

You might have thought that you would need to provide some background information about the recipient’s hobbies, interests, taste in music, books, jewellery, cars or real estate, depending on your budget. If so, you either don’t possess a smartphone or you really haven’t been paying attention these last couple of years.

For it has gradually dawned on the rest of us that our device has, for some time, been serving not only us. Unwittingly, we generously carry around, at all times, a sophisticated piece of eavesdropping kit, which records, it would appear, every keystroke we make.

It can’t have escaped your notice that, if you check out, say, car rental deals, or model figures compatible with Lego, or bluetooth speakers, or, indeed, anything, then, starting immediately, and for what seems an unconscionably long time afterwards, your phone will present you with advertisements for the same or similar items. It seems that your phone passes on the information about your internet habits to interested parties.

It must now be 20 years since I first, at work, heard talk about the fact that the real winners in the race to make big money from technology were going to be the people who “owned the eyeballs”. If you controlled what people saw on their phones, companies would beat a path to your door to pay you for ensuring that what people saw on their phones was what those companies wanted them to see.

These days, it’s even worse than that. You, like me, have probably noticed, more than once, that it is not only what you look for and look at online that ‘prompts’ what adverts you are fed; it is enough, these days, to mention a topic in conversation, on the phone, or in person. Your device is always listening, and always, it appears, relaying what it picks up. That highly sensitive inbuilt microphone is listening out for you even when you are unaware of it.

All of which is stunningly, and frighteningly, clever. And yet…and yet. There is one respect in which AI seems totally artificial and completely unintelligent. As it happens, I have, in the last week, encountered a classic example of this.

In the last couple of months, my electric shaver has been playing up. It has been growing more and more noisy; it does not shave as closely, and the shaving experience is significantly less comfortable than it used to be. I could possibly have simply replaced the shaving head, but I decided, instead, to treat myself to a new shaver with integral sideboard, moustache and beard trimmer.

While this sounds painfully bells-and-whistles expensive, it actually was very reasonable, nestling close to the bottom of Braun’s range of shavers, a range that reaches, in the heights of Series 9, an eye-watering four-digit price tag, while offering a shave that, according to Which consumer magazine, is not significantly closer than that offered in the humble foothills of Series 3, where you will find me.

So smooth is the shave I now achieve that the only person not impressed is Raphael, who still finds me much too tickly when I kiss him.

The point of this story is not simply the hope that Braun will reward my careful product placement by offering me a lifetime supply of free replacement heads. No, the real point is that, since I made the purchase online, my phone has not stopped bombarding me with adverts for electric shavers, and, specifically, Braun electric shavers. I can state, with absolute confidence, that the single product that I have absolutely no inclination or need to buy at this point in time is an electric shaver, and, specifically, a Braun shaver.

You had probably already guessed that, and you might have expected that the cumulative genius of the algorithms of AI might also have guessed it. Curiously, I take a little comfort from the knowledge that the system is, as yet, far from perfect. However, only a little comfort; I’m well aware that the intelligence gap is closing exponentially.

Mind you, having struggled for over a day to think of a topic to write about this week, the prospect of my blog being taken over by AI some time soon looks less worrying and more attractive that you might have suspected.