Can you imagine what it might have been like to live in Florence during the renaissance? According to Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine, we are, without realising it, witnessing something similar. We have already seen the creation of the internet and we are now witnessing its early adolescent development. The next big step will be adding basic intelligence to inanimate objects and then connect them to the net. After that, the big jump will be to link everyone and everything to a single brain — the network.

At this point the machine will know more about us than we know about it and we will delegate responsibility for our identity, our memory and our lives to the machine. It will be all knowing and all seeing. Does this sound like science fiction? Maybe not. In a few years time the internet will be wired up to billions of smart chips and sensors embedded in everyday objects and many of these objects will display a rudimentary form of intelligence.

From there it will be a small step to design machines that will be employed to do any task that we do more than once. If you have a job that can be distilled to a set of logical rules your job will become history. Humans will then be set free to focus on those things that require intuition, imagination or empathy. At least that’s the theory:.