TOM UTLEY: I've often mocked Mrs U's refusal to embrace the online world. But she may be right 

We like to ring the changes when we take the dog for her daily walks, rotating between the four local parks that lie within a ten-minute drive of our South London home.

Of these, my firm favourite is Dulwich Park, designed partly by Charles Barry Jr (son of the chap who built the Palace of Westminster) before being opened in 1890 by the future Liberal Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery.

Since the local Labour council introduced a charge for using the car park, however, my poor wife has had to strike Dulwich Park off her list of destinations when it's her turn to walk the dog alone.

This is not, I assure you, because I begrudge her the £2-an-hour charge for parking there, which is cheap by London standards — although of course it's annoying to have to pay for something that was free throughout our first 35 years in the area.

No, she stays away because the only means of payment accepted by the council is the PayByPhone parking app. And to put it at its mildest, Mrs U and technology just don't get on.

TOM UTLEY: My wife avoids using the PayByPhone parking app. To put it at its mildest, Mrs U and technology just don't get on (stock image)

You will understand what I mean when I tell you that it took me many agonising weeks even to teach her how to operate the dog flap we installed in the door from the kitchen to the garden when we adopted our Jack Russell/dachshund-cross from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home — and that involves no electronics at all.

Loathes

Again and again I explained to her, with ever-diminishing patience, that when the little tabs on each side of the flap were pointing upwards, it was unlocked, allowing the dog to get in or out as the fancy took her. When they were pointing towards each other, it was locked. The other two settings, I told her — letting Minnie in but not out, or out but not in — should simply be ignored.

But again and again, she set the tabs wrongly, letting Minnie jump out but not in again, or in but not out to answer a call of nature. One or other of us was always having to get up in the night when we heard the dog yapping in the garden to be let back in. Either that, or puddles would constantly appear on the kitchen floor.

Ah, well, at least Mrs U got the hang of it in the end. But as for any electronic device, I fear she's entirely at a loss, beyond any hope of instruction. She won't even try any of the wonderful tricks our car can perform, such as self-parking, cruise control, speed limiter or the option to switch the performance setting from comfort to economy or sport.

Needless to say, she refuses point blank to download the miraculous Mercedes app, which allows users not only to check the tyre pressures and fluid levels at the touch of a button, but to lock or unlock the car from anywhere in the world.

She particularly loathes the app's ability to show me at a glance where the car is, so that I can follow its movements, whoever may be behind the wheel. I guess she's afraid that if she wants to visit a secret lover, she'll have to take the bus to avoid letting me know where he lives!

Nor will she download our bank's app, though it's extremely useful as a guard against fraud, since it tells me instantly whenever a payment leaves our joint account. She feels that I'm electronically stalking her, though I promise I'm not.

Mind you, I'm hardly one to sneer at her difficulties with electronic devices. Indeed, if there were a contest for the title of World's Most Incompetent User of Modern Technology, I would be a shoo-in for the silver medal, second only to the unbeatable champ, Mrs U.

Hopeless though I am, however, even I have mastered the PayByPhone app.

But like so many others who have used it, I often find I have to linger in the car park, waiting for a signal or for validation from my bank, which for mysterious reasons is demanded in some locations, but not others.

Indeed, I'm becoming painfully used to the message 'Payment declined', which means I have either to start all over again or set off instead to Belair Park down the road, where parking remains free (but for how long?).

Since the local Labour council introduced a charge for using the car park, however, my poor wife has had to strike Dulwich Park (pictured) off her list of destinations when it's her turn to walk the dog alone

Curse

I can't help feeling that if the signal is so unreliable in Dulwich, in the shadow of the Crystal Palace transmitter masts, then how people must suffer in remote areas, far from transmitters, where the local council has switched from coin-in-the-slot meters to apps.

From a purely selfish viewpoint, however, I have to say that the introduction of Pay ByPhone charges in Dulwich Park has not been an unmitigated curse. This is because its most noticeable effect has been to keep people away, not only from the car park but from the park itself.

Indeed, there are some mornings when Minnie and I feel almost alone in those 70- odd acres. This is a rare and pleasant sensation for a Londoner, I can tell you. But I cannot believe that clearing the park for us was any part of those Southwark councillors' intention when they signed up to the app.

Far more likely, the aim was chiefly to raise revenue by the cheapest possible means, with the added bonus of joining the London Mayor's all-out war on the private car.

As I've observed before, Sadiq Khan appears to have made it his life's mission to suck the commercial heart out of the capital by making it a no-go area for the lorries, vans and cars on which businesses depend.

But where my favourite park is concerned, it's those who feel uncomfortable with modern technology who suffer most.

And inevitably, these include many of the elderly and infirm, born before the age of the internet, who depend on their cars to get down to the shops or into the fresh air.

The more I think about it, however, the more I begin to wonder if those like my wife, who can't or won't try to master electronic apps, may be far more sensible than those of us who use them every day.

In this week of the 50th anniversary of the first mobile phone call, after all, we've read about the Genesis international cyber-crime gang, whose members sold our internet identities, logins and passwords for as little as 56p each.

The terrifying advances in Artificial Intelligence mean it's clear that most of us have barely begun to appreciate the dangers we face (file image)

Emergency

True, it has finally been shut down, through the combined efforts of 17 national police agencies, including our own. But God knows how many similar operations are still flourishing, making us ever more vulnerable to fraudsters with access to every detail of our lives, from our Amazon passwords to the pressure in our tyres.

Add the terrifying advances in Artificial Intelligence — so terrifying, indeed, that Elon Musk and more than 1,800 others in the technological world have signed a letter demanding a six-month pause in further research and development — and it's clear that most of us have barely begun to appreciate the dangers we face.

I confess that at first I thought Musk and Co had read too many sci-fi fantasies if they really believed that AI machines would take over the world. Couldn't we simply unplug the machines or remove their batteries, I thought, if they began to get bolshy?

That was before I read the article in yesterday's Mail, which described how fraudsters are already using AI to clone the voices of sons and daughters to demand emergency funds from their parents. Faces can be cloned, too, so that computer images can be made to look and sound like real people we know and trust.

If AI can do all this today — and it's teaching itself to become cleverer all the time — isn't it easy to see how one day it could undermine the entire capitalist system, by destroying trust in any commercial transaction conducted over the internet?

In the past, I've often mocked Mrs U's maddening refusal to embrace the online world. I'm beginning to fear that, not for the first time, she may be right.