Ian Pearson : First Conscious Machines To Become Reality Within Five Years

Fujitsu asked BT's former Futurologist, Ian Pearson, to write a report on how technology is influencing our lives. Having worked for 16 years at BT peering through his virtual crystal ball, Mr Pearson is ideally placed to track and predict new developments throughout information technology, considering both technological and social implication. He kindly accepted to answer a few of our questions regarding the future of mankind, security, robots and of course, the Matrix and Blade Runner.

1. Mr Pearson, your 'Life and How We'll Live It' Futurizon report talks about smart dust speckles. How far are we from this scenario?

Smart dust already exists; the smallest chips only a fraction of a millimetre across. But with feature sizes still a long way from the limits, they can get a lot smaller. Using the third dimension with many layers, it will be possible to get truly dust sized particles with significant power, storage and sensory capability.

2. The recent case of the MI6 employee who managed to steal tens of thousands of files using a tiny USB drive shows the advances of miniaturisation, but where's the limit?

Engineers keep breaking what used to be considered the limits, but I guess it is hard to imagine getting much further than a few bits per atom, using electrons as a 'Pauli switch' and maybe their spin states also as storage.

Sounds science fiction today, but one day it will be possible. Today, tens of thousands of atoms are used for each bit of storage or each transistor. Another way of looking at it is that all the information stored in 10,000 human brains would fit comfortably in a pin head at such densities.

3. The document you prepare mentions the pervasiveness of the Cloud, something that through aggressive redundancy processes could become autonomous. What impact will this have on people's lives?

Autonomous is an ambiguous term. On one interpretation it can simply mean highly automated. We will certainly be able to make self-organising clouds that provide massive processing power, communications, storage and sensing, all with minimal intervention. They could even self heal and re-route and be hard to crash.

That would make life much easier, but also could eliminate the need for many jobs. But the opportunities created by such a cloud would generate far more, so the balance would be an increase in jobs. We are all used to the idea of continuous learning and the need to adapt. This just takes it to the next level.