Hello, Robot review – where human and machine don't quite meet

There was a time when Nineteen Eighty-Four required some suspension of disbelief: it didn't seem possible, in the first several decades after the book's publication, that any government or institution would have the resources and organisation to put transmitting and receiving devices in every home and then monitor the information they captured. We now know how very plausible that is. What Orwell didn't guess was that people would, at the prompting of Amazon and Apple, actually invite such things into their homes. No state programme of installation was needed. That the future has become the present, in shapes that weren't quite predicted, is part of the premise of Hello, Robot, an exhibition now showing at the V&A Dundee.