Today it's a cute friend. Tomorrow it could be the dominant life form

given where we were in the late 1990s and where we are now, where will we be in ten or even twenty years time? What will robots be capable of in 2030? Will we be able to trust an Asimo servant not to spike our drink? Indeed, will Asimo still be our servant or will the roles have been reversed?

“the singularity”

At this stage it will then be intelligent machines, robots if you like, or upgraded humans, augmented by a merger with technology, who become the dominant life forms on Earth.

But is this actually a possibility

how could a computer appreciate the smell of a rose or understand a joke? And even so, if a robot ever got out of hand, well, we could always switch it off, couldn't we?

Can we switch off the internet today, practically, realistically?

We must not think in terms of individual machines, but a network

have only five senses: it is estimated that humans sense less than 5 per cent of what is going on around them