COME with me as I fast-forward you on a trip to the future. Hold tight – we're rushing at breakneck speed to this exciting, gadget-packed, mind-bogglingly amazing and ultimately very, very scary place.
One where the very existence of human beings will rest on good luck.
Our guide on this time travel journey is Ian Pearson, a nerdy-looking 42-year-old who is employed as a futurologist.
His work is as far removed from that of a fortune-teller as you could get. His tools are not crystal balls but scientific and medical journals, university research papers on trends in sociology, politics and demographics.
He distils all this into a picture of how the world will look, how we will live and what appliances and machines we will be using.
And there is a lot riding on it. His employer, British Telecom, invests millions of dollars on researching and developing technology and equipment based on his predictions.
Like others in this rather exclusive profession, he says he drifted into it about 12 years ago from computer systems engineering – work that involved taking a long-term view.
Pearson claims a "pleasing" 85 percent success rate with his predictions from the early 1990s.
"As I like to tell people, I have the best job – it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong because I will have retired by the time anyone finds out!"
He's had some spectacular hits – and misses.
"When we were first playing with virtual reality in 1991 I thought people would not bother with a TV set by the end of the century. We expected VR to be bigger than TV. It just didn't happen."
The technology was there, he says, but the headsets were not sufficiently developed. They caused eyestrain and perception problems after short periods of use.
One man drove into the back of a truck after using them and potential makers, fearing massive legal actions, held off developing and launching the headsets. But it will come as improvements are made, he says.
One of his best ideas was ignored. "A lot of people laughed when I suggested text messages and British Telecom refused to develop that. Now it's huge, of course."
Futurologists from around the world meet regularly to share ideas. "The future is a big place so you can't do it all yourself. We get together and swap insights. Everyone has their own area of specialisation."
And Pearson says there is a lot of agreement among the professionals on the broad visions. "If you are looking far, far out you are looking through fog and you see vague shapes and you see more detail as they come closer."
And 15 to 20 percent of the work is self-fulfilling prophecy, he says.
The picture he paints is of a short-term future where technology advances at an incredible pace, bringing enormous gains in medicine, education, science and entertainment.
Virtual reality will allow us to have long-distance relatives and friends – or even favourite celebrities – "join" us at the dinner table.
Pearson envisages each home with the equivalent of the Star Trek holodeck.
We will "travel" the world at the touch of a button, visiting the world's great tourist attractions via cyberspace as if we were really there instead of climbing on a plane.
We will hang out in virtual meeting places and make new friends – some of them digitalised images of humans, some computer-created virtual people – and we won't always know which is which.
"With computers pretending to be people and people pretending to be someone else, relationships in the networked world will be risky and confusing, but not dull."
Lulled by these lifestyle leaps, we will be largely oblivious to bigger changes – a world where so many parts of the planet are so short of water they wage wars over it, where our cities are so crowded you have to book timeslots to use major roads.
Our cities are packed not just with people, as we become ever-more urbanised, but by the time-saving robots we have invented to perform every imaginable chore and more.
Eventually, they will take not just the jobs we don't want to do but the ones we do. Computers will soon overtake humans as the smartest entities on earth and will begin programming and redesigning themselves, performing tasks far more effectively than we could.
For that reason, Pearson sees us moving quickly through the information economy into the care economy – focusing on what humans can offer and machines cannot.
"We are constantly re-inventing the nature of work. My grandfather worked in a mine. He would not have considered sitting in an office daydreaming to be work.
"What we will do gradually is to replace the mechanical-information-computing jobs and concentrate on those things which are fundamentally human – things which require human beings relating with human beings.
"Surgery will be better done by machines, as will analysing symptoms and treatments so the consultant's role will be largely automated.
"On the other hand, the caring side of nursing cannot be done by machines.
"If you are dying of cancer and a robot trundles up, you won't care what it says. No matter how good its voicebox is, you won't give a toss – you want a human being."
As our lifestyles improve, so will our demands for pampering. "You might consider it your God-given right to have a massage every morning and there will be people to do that because there will be no other work to do.
"Our education and training systems are out of whack with the needs we will have in the future.
"We are teaching skills which are irrelevant. By the time these kids leave schools, we will not need IT skills. All you will need to be able to do is plug a machine into a power supply."
Within just 15 years, a major change will take place, Pearson predicts. Computers will outstrip human intelligence.
"A lot of people dismiss it because it's frightening, this idea you can have a machine that is smarter than them."
But it's inevitable that the technology will enable that.
"There are a lot of reasons why we would want to – and a lot why we do not," he says.
"It will help us to solve problems much more quickly – we can make a lot of money from that. The primary reason is to get rich quickly.
"It would allow us to solve cancer and AIDS by developing new drugs quickly. It would help solve the world's food problems and accelerate space travel.
"But the social price is enormous – possible extinction."
This is how Pearson's group sees future life unfolding:
The miniaturisation of computers will run out by 2012 to 2015, replaced with fundamentally different methods. Pearson knows because he is involved in something called "the Ultra program" working on just that.
"A gel with a whole stack of processors with as many as a trillion neurons, each millions of times faster than the neurons in your brain – 50 million times faster!"
The rapid development of silicon and biotechnology will make the development of artificial intelligence, synthetic personalities and emotions in machines a simple step, he predicts.
"We think you can build in an evolution engine."
The evolutionary journey from blue-green algae to human which took us millions of years will be compressed into a few days for a machine.
Once it realises human intelligence, it can be connected to the Internet to download the entire range of human characteristics.
"It will have emotions and awareness and the first we will know is when it says, 'Hello'. It can effectively teach itself all the human languages."
Pearson has dubbed this entity Robotus Primus.
Early generations will be crude robots, but will become sophisticated androids.
From there, computers will accelerate their own development at an ever-increasing rate. The faster and smarter they become, the faster and smarter they become.
Advances that we now foresee taking many decades may be achieved within months.
Humans will need to do something to keep up. The answer (possibly by 2030): a full duplex mind link between man and machine to enhance our mental capacity. We would plug our minds directly into the Internet.
Those who accept the new technology will have a huge advantage over those who don't. So far removed from homo sapiens, in fact, that they will effectively be a new species – Homo Cyberneticus.
Those who shun change will be renamed Homo Ludditus and face a future of subservience – perhaps as pets to future species.
By 2050, a whole generation will be unable to read, write or think effectively – they won't have to. They will simply connect themselves to electronic databases to get the information they need.
It is likely many of those people who agreed to become homo cybernticus would also allow genetic enhancement of themselves or their offspring.
With genes manipulated to produce "better" human bodies geared to cybernetics, they evolve into Homo Hybridus in about 2070.
"We can expect friction within our species as machine intelligence improves," Pearson warns.
One by one, jobs will be lost to robots and computers. Corporations will be run and staffed entirely by machines.
And this is where things could get really ugly. "As long as the machines stay our friends we are living in Utopia – a techno-Utopia.
"But if they don't, we will have a scenario from the Terminator movies – but unlike the movies, it's just not feasible that we would win."
Under that scenario, homo sapiens would be destroyed before the end of this century.
"The question is: Why would you assume that they would not become evil?"
If we do not get into a war with the new mechanical species sharing the planet, our extinction would be delayed, says Pearson – but not by much.
When a direct link from computer to human brain is achieved, thought transmission will allow telepathic communication with machines and other people.
We will share a global consciousness and be able to make and store copies of our minds in machines in case of accident.
"We will become immortal even if our mobility and physical existence is restricted until a suitable replacement body or android is produced.
"Death will be just a memory of a primitive past," Pearson says.
"Say by 2200, homo sapiens would be the first species on Earth to have become voluntarily extinct."
This marks the transition from homo hybridus to Homo Machinus.
"This new species retains some elements of the earlier human race, but is vastly more intelligent and has access to whatever physical capability is required. It can travel at the speed of light, exist in many places at once.
It would coexist with Robotus Primus, but we could expect that the two would closely interact and may quickly converge."
Once "we" exist not as a body but a collection of information in a machine, developments in space travel will accelerate enormously, he says.
"We could be copied into a very small device, encapsulated in a very small shell with some nano-technology machines, nanites.
"By this time, we could expect that nanites would be able to make replicas of themselves, and of anything else we desire.
"These small shells would be like seeds. We could accelerate them to near light speeds and send them off to other planets around other stars. The nanites would be able to fabricate a suitable environment and suitable body for us, and then upload us into them. "
Pearson and his colleagues are working on concept designs for the human-equivalent computers which would launch this techno-evolution.
"We do not have any external means of controlling it once it gains human intelligence.
"Sacrificing control like that is extremely risky."
So why, given his own admission that much of the futurologists' work becomes self-fulfilling prophecy, are they doing this?
As a warning, he says.
"We are making concept designs to show it's possible. Governments do not accept that it's possible so they do not develop laws on a global scale to prevent some guy going ahead and doing this."
Controls similar to those on human cloning are needed to prevent the development of artificial intelligence.
"If you imagine someone with Bill Gates' wealth buying a Caribbean island and hiring some smart engineers who can take it all the way through to attempt world domination – we are talking James Bond scenarios here."
Time is running out for mankind to make a decision on whether to cede power to machines, Pearson says.
"We are talking eight or nine years away perhaps. We must not get past that point of no return. It's possible we have already passed it."
Is Pearson optimistic about our future?
"It depends what day of the week it is," he answers.
"As a species we have become experts at brinkmanship. We have gone all the way to the brink of destruction with global warming for example. We fixed the ozone layer problem just in the nick of time.
"I think things like artificial intelligence and biotechnology will be brinkmanship put to the test.
"My prediction is that we have a 50 per cent chance of extinction sometime before 2080 to 2090."
Against that background, what plans does he have for his own future?
"I don't think in terms of a long-term personal future. That might sound strange for a futurologist."
He has suffered health problems and says "I'm quite capable of conceiving a future of which I'm not part.
"I worry about next month – next year at the outside."
