"In the future, voice connectivity will be in every room and almost every object," Boris Johnson said | Spencer Platt/Getty Images Boris Johnson warns of ‘digital authoritarianism’ in UN speech In his one nod to Brexit, PM likens the process of quitting the EU to Greek mythology.

On the day the U.K.’s highest court ruled he had unlawfully suspended parliament, British PM Boris Johnson wanted to talk instead about the challenges posed by Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa.

"Digital authoritarianism is not, alas, the stuff of dystopian fantasy but of an emerging reality," Johnson warned bemused world leaders in his inaugural address to the U.N. General Assembly in New York late Tuesday, calling on them to be "more ambitious" in ensuring "that new advances reflect our values."

"In the future, voice connectivity will be in every room and almost every object," the PM said. "Your mattress will monitor your nightmares; your fridge will beep for more cheese, your front door will sweep wide the moment you approach, like some silent butler; your smart meter will go hustling for the cheapest electricity. And every one of them minutely transcribing your every habit in tiny electronic shorthand, stored not in their chips or their innards ... but in some great cloud of data that lours ever more oppressively over the human race, a giant dark thundercloud waiting to burst. And we have no control over how or when the precipitation will take place."

The "internet of things" could be useful, but "could also be used to keep every citizen under round-the-clock surveillance," Johnson told the half-empty audience, as some leaders and their envoys appeared to be attempting to stifle their mirth. "A future [Amazon] Alexa will pretend to take orders. But this Alexa will be watching you, clucking her tongue and stamping her foot."

Johnson also pondered the implications of artificial intelligence.

“AI, what will it mean?” he mused. “Helpful robots washing and caring for an aging population, or pink-eyed terminators sent back from the future to cull the human race? What will synthetic biology stand for: restoring our livers and our eyes with miracle regeneration of the tissues, like some fantastic hangover cure? Or will it bring terrifying limbless chickens to our tables? Will nanotechnology help us to beat disease, or will it leave tiny robots to replicate in the crevices of our cells?"

In his one nod to Brexit, Johnson likened the process of quitting the EU to Greek mythology.

"When Prometheus brought fire to mankind ... Zeus punished him by chaining him to a Tartarean crag while his liver was pecked out by an eagle," the PM noted. "And every time his liver regrew the eagle came back and pecked it again. And this went on forever — a bit like the experience of Brexit in the U.K., if some of our parliamentarians had their way."

Johnson also used his address to the U.N. to lament the fact there are "people today who are actually still anti-science," pointing to those who oppose vaccination, "and who by their prejudices are actually endangering the very children they want to protect." He added: "I totally reject this anti-scientific pessimism."

Johnson concluded his speech by inviting the assembled leaders to a tech summit next year in London, where, he joked "it is not raining 94 percent of the time."