Apple’s iPhone 4S offers a tantalising glimpse of the future in the form of SIRI, which allows users to use normal conversation to send messages or ask questions.

But this is a very basic technology.

In a decade or so, probably less, you will be able to have a personal digital or avatar-based assistant available in a variety of forms (human, aliens, animals, fantasy characters, Jeremy Clarkson?) that are animated and have personalities. We will use them as secretaries, assistants, playthings and occasionally partners to help us navigate the world and get things done. Basic versions of this technology might also be called synthetic personalities, digital humans or digital ‘bots and some forms of this technology already exist in customer services roles or on websites, usually to save money or to deal with frequency asked questions or boring tasks.

In the future they will also be used in as assistants in education, especially younger years schooling where they will teach repetitive rules based tasks such as language or mathematics. They will also appear in aged care, reminding elderly people to take their medicine or simply acting as digital companions. It is also likely that they will form the interface – or just the face – between humans and robots in the future.

Avatars assistants will also be highly personalisable in the sense regional accents could be chosen or personality flaws and moods added. There may even be the option of getting the personality of an avatar assistant to mirror that of its ‘owner’ or an owner starting to adapt their own personality in line with that of their avatar – something referred to as the Proteus effect.

And don’t forget that they will be connected to the internet, which will itself be connected to virtually everything else. Therefore you will, be able to ask you avatar assistant to turn the oven on, run a bath, dim the lights or play computer games with you.

Click here to watch Dave Evans, Chief Futurist, Digital Assistants, from Cisco talk about some aspects of this.

Moore’s Law says computers double their processing ability every 18-24 months, but imagine if this sped up exponentially to every two hours. That is one potential consequence of machines with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). If computers continue to advance at their current rate, this could be a mere 20-30 years away.

Intel is already reinventing the transistor by harnessing photons and quantum properties to increase processing power. Whether it happens suddenly, or over time, it appears that machines will become increasingly sophisticated and able to do the work of humans.

Any true AGI would need at least four capabilities to be like us: to recognise objects, handle complex dialogue, be manually dextrous, and understand social situations from someone else’s point of view. Children come to learn each of these slowly until the age of eight, when all are present. There is no reason why robots could not be made to deal with whatever tasks they are required to do, whether it is to put groceries away or to babysit a child. But will they be able to fall in love or mourn someone’s death?

Some say that the agricultural and industrial revolutions were parallels, because of the rapid pace of change compared to what had gone before. Over the past 7,000 years, output doubled every 900 years. Now output doubles about every 15 years, about 60 times as fast as in the previous seven millennia.

The next radical jump will come from two shortages in our economy: human time and human attention. If robots are able to take over what people do (and two-thirds of a nation’s income is paid directly for wages), then there will be a massive jump in output, freeing humans to do other things. But what?

It is cheaper to build robots than it is to pay someone over a lifetime. But perhaps the value of human work would rise, with some people (perhaps robots?) paying to be served by humans rather than robots.

Robots that do solely cognitive work may live in virtual environments, or even be tiny, while others will exist in human environments and be more lifelike. Whatever the outcome, it seems certain that on on level that there will be a merger of biological and non-biological intelligence.

So here’s the thing. A while ago I had a big birthday bash at a fancy restaurant, one which I had been to and thoroughly enjoyed a few years earlier. The first problem was jeans. I thought I should check to see whether I could wear jeans along with a white shirt and dark blue jacket. After, all this is England, not laid back Australia.. “No” came the response. Fair enough I thought, so I dressed up like Mr Toad.

Arrival was fine, although I am always somewhat suspicious of a hotel/restaurant with electric gates.

Inside my suspicions were confirmed. Gone was the smokey and rather eccentric entrance hall and in its place was what can only be described as a Travel Lodge Luxe aesthetic.

No matter.

So we went into the bar, looked at the women wearing jeans (!) and then devoured the menu (too much dead stuff, nothing I really wanted). Then the wine list.

“Have you got anything really old?” I asked.

“Oh no sir, all our wine is new”

At this point I knew we were in serious trouble.

I was right.

In the main room, the waiters were all wearing white gloves. Oh please. Most of them also spoke like the art gallery assistant in Beverly Hills Cop.

“We avvv sisss, or you can avvve theeese” “Vitch voood you prefffer siiiiir”

But that was just for starters. The best was yet to come.

The main courses didn’t arrive on plates. It arrived on flat bits of black slate (i.e. floor tiles). Maybe they’d had a run on plates? As a result the sauce went all over the table. “Set me cleeenzzzz sis up for yooou siiiiir.”

The cheese was good and Michael, the man behind the cheese, was a laugh in the nicest possible sense. Diamond geezer. All in all though, pretentious nonsense with everything drenched in buttock clenching service.

And £600 for five people. Ouch!

So what to do?

If this (“siiisss”) has been a great meal I would have thought to myself, that this was a great meal. I wouldn’t have blogged or gone anywhere near Trip Advisor. But it was bad. Really bad (did I mention that my dad got food poisoning from a prawn that had tried unsuccessfully to walk overland back to Asia but was caught somewhere in Eastern Europe?).

So, yes, I went straight on to trip Advisor and said pretty much what I’ve told you here. Now what’s interesting to me here is two things. First, I wouldn’t have posted comments if the experience was a good one. So does this mean that sites like these are naturally biased towards poor experiences and negative feelings?

Two (“tahwoo”), I wouldn’t have posted a comment in my own name. Anonymity created a feeling of cyber courage that warps relations between people.

Fortunately, when I was posting my comments it was very late at night and I managed to use an incorrect email address, so none of this actually made it onto the site.

“Di yow avve an exccccccelent naught siiiiir?”

“Yeeeseeeessss. It vaz veeeeeery enjoyabbbbbbbble except fooor sa fowd powsioingggg?”.

The sociologist Frank Furedi says that: ‘It is not hope that excites and shapes the cultural imagination in the early twenty-first century; it is fear’.

Since the millennium bug we’ve seen dramatic warnings about everything from obesity and eco-doom to global economic collapse and there is a general sense that the world is becoming more uncertain and unsafe. There has certainly been a heightened religious and cultural focus on fear and apocalyptic scenarios, with a disproportionate amount of media attention and public funding being given over to address these fears. Moreover, politicians have becoming adept at using the prism of fear to appeal to our irrational herd instincts. But are people really worried?

A global survey by the World Social Summit (WSS) has found that the vast majority of people (90.2%) admit that they have day-to-day worries (largely individual and local) but only 42.4% claim to have any serious anxieties. Meanwhile, 11.9% claim that are ‘overwhelmed’ by fear whereas 55.3% say that they have a positive attitude towards life and 24.3% say they are optimistic (and yes I know these figures don’t add up to 100%). These survey results are interesting, especially within the context of a recent gathering at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.

Here a gaggle of physicists, sociologists, microbiologists and philosophers met to discuss ‘mega-catastrophes’ that could wipe out millions of people or produce the total collapse of civilisation (ie, things to really worry about). The conclusions are fascinating. Basically, we shouldn’t panic because most risks are covered and in the grand scheme of things we’ve never been safer. For instance, bioterrorism is becoming more unlikely because the industry is consolidating and anyone trying to do something stupid or ‘unusual’ will almost certainly trigger alarm.

Equally, the threat of nuclear war is less than it has been for 15 years, due to a reduction of nuclear arsenals. Similarly, the threat of nuclear terrorism has also fallen due to the removal of vulnerable material together with stronger security surrounding smuggling (did you know, for instance, that some cities have alarms that instantly warn the authorities if something sinister passes over a bridge or through a tunnel?)

How about cosmic threats? Well the threat of rogue asteroids is a non-starter. Scientists have mapped all the ‘rogue rocks’ that are out there so we are unlikely to go the way of the dinosaurs anytime soon. Similarly, the H5N1 strain of influenza virus is out there and an outbreak is possible, not least because of the stacked nature of urban populations and the connectivity afforded by air travel and migration. But worst-case scenario planning covers even this threat.

So are there any threats left? Yes, two. The first is nanotechnology. It is just too early to quantify the threats represented by tinkering with atoms. Equally, artificial intelligence is too far away in any meaningful sense to assess. As for things to look forward to, a by-product of the racial soup created by migration and interbreeding is that the gene pool is getting more diverse and evolution is accelerating faster than would usually happen. Thus it is entirely possible that an individual will arise within the global population that has unprecedented insight or empathy and he or she will use this vision to form a new scientific or political paradigm.

Apologies. I’m frantic this morning. Everything seems to be happening at once, so no time whatsoever to write anything serious. Instead a quote from Ogden Nash that a few people aged 40+ might find rings true (geddit?)

“Middle age:  When you’re sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you. “

A few choice comments from people last week. First an invented word from the poet Matt Harvey whom I met on Thursday. Dystopiary.

Second, a comment about a comment made by Eric Pickles about the money that could be saved by the public sector if more people worked from home.

“Working from home is like being under house arrest”

BTW, I’ve figured out what the Wall Street and St Paul’s protests might be about. Unfocused dismay.

There’s nothing like a deadline to get you thinking. I think it was Douglas Adams who said something along the lines of loving deadlines. Especially the whooshing sound they make as they rush past.

As usual Leonard Cohen has got the words right. I’m off to take a few pictures and have a conversation with a few of the people camped out by St Paul’s…

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said repent repent
I wonder what they meant

I rather like this. It’s from Taylor Young and is a model of what’s hot and what’s not. If you are not familiar with thematic investment this is a way of using certain emerging social, demographic, economic and technological trends etc to imform investment strategies. If you look at some of the broad themes I write about you should immediately notice a number of these themes ranging from ageing and resource scarcity to mobile connectivity. (See this blog,  What’s Next, my trend maps or Future Files for more on this).

So, for example, if you buy into the ageing trend (and it’s hard not to) this immediately throws up some investment opportunities ranging from healthcare and food to retail and travel. Mix in another trend such as connectivity and you have a potential sweet spot of remote monitoring technology that enhances quality of life, reduces healthcare costs or allows people to live at home for longer.

Of course, the problem is not so much recognising particular themes, but in working out which companies in a particular sector or industry will be the winners over a long period. It wouldn’t take a genius to highlight clean energy, for example, but which of the thousands of companies, big and small, that are involved in this area will come out on top in the longer term?

BTW, this is general information and in no way represents any specific investment recommendation or advice as my lawyer friends would say.

James has just sent me an email:

“You mention on one of your Timelines “Middle Class Revolution” With the recent situation in Greece and other European countries could this scenario occur, and what could happen if such a scenario happened?”

I usually find it easier to ask questions than answer my own questions, but let’s explore this. Firstly it’s not my idea. Some time ago I noticed a wild card developed by the MOD that was more or less this. The idea being that instead of a working class revolution coming from Marxist ideals you get a middle class revolution coming from elsewhere.

Specifically (and I’m making this up now) the middle gets fed up with the fact that those at the bottom of society are protected economically in the sense that they have lost everything already (they are already unemployed and on benefits so how much worse can it get?). Similarly, the elite at the top (1%, 10% who can say) are protected in the sense that they have enough money to avoid tax or physically move if things get really nasty. Hence, the much talked about middle class squeeze where the normally quiet classes get rather angry about the fact that they can no longer afford certain things (decent schools, hospitals, houses and so on).

Is this what’s happening right now with the protests? Is this a middle class revolution? No. What’s happening now is largely youth based the aims of which are rather fuzzy. What ties the protests together (and I think this does link with feelings elsewhere) is a kind  of general dismay and disappoinment. People know something is wrong, but they are unsure what it is and what should be done about it. There  is certainly a link between  austerity and unrest too, but I can see very little linkage with the Arab Spring.

So in general this is more of a re-birth of youthful socialist ideals than any revolution from a broader middle-aged, middle-class base as far as I can see.

One point I would like to make is that I think this whole issue is largely about fairness, but the thing that many people seem to have forgotten is that it takes two sides to make a bad loan and the bankers (a few not all of them) supplied the money, but someone, somewhere, took it. Many of the people complaining about austerity are precisely the ones that borrowed too much money and saved next to nothing and they are equally to blame when it comes to greed.

What is more interesting to my mind, and potentially a trigger that turns mild protest into something much nastier, is that what is now dawning on a few people is the idea that things could be getting worse permanently. What I mean by this is that people got used to the fact that one generation lives better materially than the last. This went on from about the 1960s onwards. But the rise of the East and decline of the West means that this may no longer be true.

It could be that living standards are now going to decline over the long-term and that infrastructure and services start to crumble too. Add to this weaker labour unions and stronger corporations and…

When things go wrong people often look for someone to blame. At the moment the anger is directed at bankers and government and I guess the aims of the protesters is some kind of replacement for capitalism (what the aims of protesters in Greece are I really have no idea). Will they succeed? No. Not unless something happens externally. If the global economy does go into meltdown then this will, I believe, trigger a major re-think about how the entire system operates (something that didn’t happen last time because things didn’t collapse enough).

This could result (but I doubt it) in nice cuddly capitalism. Or, more likely, anger starts to be directed externally and it is globalization that collapses in the sense that it’s every nation for themselves and we see a rise of isolationism and economic protectionism.

Or perhaps we get a bifurcation where the West (and North) move towards a decade or more of austerity (shades of Japan in the 1990s) whereas the East and South boom. Personally I find this a little unlikely due to our newly connected nature, but it’s possible.

So could a middle-class revolution happen? Certainly.  But I can’t see one coming quite yet. As to what would happen if there were one that’s a good question.  To answer that one would, I guess, have to define middle-class and then dig into the values and ideals of this group, if indeed such a coherent group exists.

One final thought. What really worries me is not austerity per se but the level of youth unemployment in some countries and the widening gap between the haves and the have nots. A lack of social cohesion and resilience (strong in the 1930s) is are also areas for concern and is perhaps why it is difficult to believe that the current protest will endure.

So in summary the protests are not about ethics per se but about what happens when rising expectations meet declining opportunities.

The most interesting thing of all is perhaps the fact that people feel the need to physically occupy a space to make some kind of point. People Facebook and Twitter alone but they still protest together it seems.