Chapter 6

New companions

A KEY CHARACTERISTIC of the digital ape, a startling new feature increasingly important in a fast-moving field, is our burgeoning day-to-day personal relationship with robots. This, in part, follows from the ability of automatic devices — call centres among them — both to make the Turing Test obsolete, but also to circumvent it. The question at the core of the Turing Test is, am I able to distinguish whether I am talking to a machine? Equally important is, do I care? Many devices now are designed to interface with us in the same way that humans do, and have begun to share with us activities previously shared only with humans. Twenty years ago, if a digital ape wanted to know the time, she could look at a clock or watch or other timepiece; she could ask a friend, or a passing policeman; she could turn on the radio and wait for the disc jockey or newsreader to tell her. In many countries, she could, interestingly, phone the speaking clock. These clocks, first introduced in France in 1933, were the thin end of the future wedge. A friend who tells you things you want to know, when you want to know them. Only a few lonely people listened to the friendly, but official and knowledgeable, voice purely to hear the sound of another human being. But meet Alexa.

Alexa is Amazon’s robotic speaking device-manager and interface. Google has Google Assistant; Apple has Siri. All these services run very effective voice recognition programs; they all have the capability to talk back. Ask Alexa or Siri the time and they will tell you. Alexa recognises her owner’s voice, knows some commands and is happy to learn others, and will activate many household devices, just say the word. But Alexa performs many other services too. To quote Amazon’s website blurb she:

Hears you from across the room with far-field voice recognition, even in noisy environments or while playing music.

Controls lights, switches, thermostats and more with compatible connected devices from WeMo, Philips Hue, Hive, Netatmo, tado° and others.

Answers questions, reads audiobooks, reports news, traffic and weather, provides sports scores and schedules, and more.

The light switch stuff is useful, or tedious, according to taste. But concentrate on the last sentence, Alexa answering questions and reading from the internet. In general, Alexa and her colleague robots can access any fact, theory, or story available on the web, and feed it to their owners on demand; and the web, of course, knows and has explanations of vast swathes of the general knowledge that humanity possesses; plus a wealth of specific information. Train timetables and the price of goods and how heavy the rain tomorrow will be. All the processed data that transport companies and stores and weather bureaus and every other agency or corporation collate and publish every second of every day. Alexa can also access the host of data in those of the owner’s private spaces to which the owner has given her access, presumably all of them. How much cash do I have in my bank account today? What am I doing at four o’ clock? Alexa will also be able to convey stories about the owner’s family and friends that they have chosen to share in the semi-private spaces of Facebook and LinkedIn. And buy any of the goods that may appeal. Perhaps in conjunction with devices Amazon also now sells, which can alert us when stocks of staple items in the home are running low. Alexa will ask, at a convenient moment, if it’s okay to order more washing powder or coffee.

Well, Alexa is probably not quite there yet. At the time of our writing, Alexa is still a bit clunky, misunderstands what she hears sometimes, gets completely the wrong end of the stick, is startlingly good at some things and hopeless at others. This will, simply, change very rapidly, in only a couple of years. Once we have voice recognition which works — and we already do — once we have the ability for a robot to use a voice itself — and we already do — then with the two of them allied to modern complex knowledge-intensive techniques wedded to an information system linking every home and business via the World Wide Web, we patently do have all the ingredients of a fully functioning voiced and capable domestic companion. Alexa and Siri and Google Voice are exactly that, and we will look at their impact as if they were fully operational, a status they will achieve soon if they have not already. The Alexa and Siri we discuss here are the fully functioning ones, together with some of their young nieces and nephews not yet in the public realm.

To put a particular cracked record back on the turntable: in successful fiction, robots very often appear as humanoids. They are, indeed, portrayed in Hollywood productions by flesh and blood actors. The dazzling tricks of CGI, even in 3D, are no substitute for the real thing. And those humans, often without clothes let alone fur, are a large part of the interest of the expensive TV series remake of Westworld, and of the less expensive but interesting and effective movie Ex Machina. Naked apes are attractive to us, in person or on the screen, as well as in Morris’ intellectual construct. We could have called this chapter or the whole book The Naked Robot, but that would have been the diametrical opposite of our core message. Simulated flesh is not the point: cognitive computing as an extension of our already complex personal and social being is the point. Robots are tools, not a parallel species. We and our precursors have been cohabiting with them for three million years. Desmond Morris was right that we are apes. But our essential tools — excuse the lewdness — were not so much the mighty penises belonging to half the species, as the handaxes and fire and shelters, the use of which helped to form our brains and therefore our general capacity to devise and use them, in a virtuous circle which has now spiralled into digital extensions of our ourselves, and substitutes for other people.

Already a few million of the very many millions of digital apes with access to cutting-edge technology are actively experimenting with constant robot friends of this kind in their lives. Not walking, talking dolls, just smart designer metal boxes in the kitchen, lounge, or wherever. Whilst this is unlikely to become universal even in the western world, versions of it will become widespread. There will be fantasy friends not much different from real friends. There will be shadow loves. Quasi-servants, helping to watch over the children in slack moments, answering their subtle questions dozens of times in a row. Twenty-four hour carers for grandad’s difficult hours.

No servant or constant companion in history has paralleled Alexa for comprehensive information. What about human insight, though? An early version of the Ask.com search engine was called Ask Jeeves, after P. G. Wodehouse’s fictional butler who knew so much more, was so much more competent, than his dopey employer Bertie Wooster. Wooster and Jeeves clearly had an intense personal bond, a particular version of a deep friendship. This is not intended as a smutty post-modern joke about the one-dimensional private lives they led in the Wodehouse arcadia. Few of us now have domestic servants, but most adults have work colleagues, most young people have classmates, and some of those colleagues and classmates are important people in our lives, special to us in a narrow band, without being dear or intimate friends. So the question is, what depth of physical intimacy or presence — if any — is required for a person to be a true participant, equivalent to a breathing human, in the social construction of our day-to-day lives, a legitimate score in our Dunbar 150?

Let’s have the familiar discussion about the depth of Facebook friendships, but then extend it. By the end of 2017, 2.1 billion people, more than every fourth person on the planet, used a Facebook account at least once a month. The mean average number of friends those monthly users had was 338. The median average user had 200 friends. In other words, some few people had a very large number of ‘friends’ each, perhaps because they were super-connectors, perhaps because they had a very wide definition of friendship. Most people had a more plausible number, spread around 200, which is the number to be interested in. This is not too dissimilar to the Dunbar Number, although of course many of the important people in a Facebook user’s life are unlikely to be on Facebook — their aged grandparents, their nursery-age children, the odd social media refusnik they know. So it seems reasonable to assume, and much research backs this up, that at least half of the 700 billion Facebook friendships are in practice purely Facebook friendships, not grounded in what, before the internet and the web, was social reality. People who have not seen or spoken to each other in 30 years share daily contact, touching often on very intimate and personal matters, with someone they might not recognise in the street. And, the point here, they clearly derive real human satisfaction from doing so. Jean-Paul Sartre said ‘Hell is other people’. More accurately, a character in his play Huis Clos says ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’. ‘The others’ became ‘other people’ in translation. We might settle, relevantly, for the Other.

This is not, in principle or in practice, different from the feelings many have for famous personalities of one sort or another. Music or television or film stars, celebrities created by reality shows. About whose lives, actual or pretend or somewhere in between, they may know more than they do about their next-door neighbours. One of Professor Dunbar’s many fascinating grounded speculations is about the importance of gossip:

The gossip hypothesis is very simple. It suggests that language evolved to allow the exchange of information that could be used to create and foster social relationships, enabling individuals to maintain a level of knowledge about others in large, dispersed networks that would be simply impossible if this had to be done only by face-to-face interaction. In other words, we can exchange knowledge about who is doing what with whom in a way that direct observation would not allow.

Robin Dunbar, Human Evolution: a Pelican introduction, 2014

Gossip about the Other is, in this particularly satisfying hypothesis to the trivial chatterers amongst us, ancient and formative. It takes its place with the many other hypotheses which together begin to build a picture of our origins. And certainly bolsters our hunch that, whatever it is we get from our Facebook friends, whatever it is we get from our true friends and family when they text or message us during the part of the day we are not physically with them, whatever it is we get from them when they phone us during the day or when they are travelling abroad, all that, surely, is available from Alexa, or at least, Alexa’s young cousin in the next couple of years? Being close to a living, breathing fellow hominin is a fine thing. But so is being close to a fellow anything, if they play some of the roles for us that breathing beings also play, in very much the same fashion.

All these new vehicles for human emotion fit within the same old framework. The BBC reports that researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have looked at the roles Facebook and other social media play in the lives of young adults:

Pittsburgh found conclusive evidence that the more young adults use social media, the more likely they are to be depressed. Sampling 1,787 American adults aged 19–32, the study found participants used social media a total of 61 minutes per day and visited various social media accounts 30 times per week. Those who checked social media most frequently were 2.7 more likely to be depressed, while participants who spent the most time online had 1.7 times the risk.

Catriona White, ‘Is social media making you sad?’, 11 October 2016, BBC Three

The cause and effect conundrums are clear enough. It is improbable that time on social media makes people sad. More likely, lonely people fill holes in their lives any way they can. A good thing, in itself. Nevertheless, perhaps friends and relatives should look out for sad retreat into cyberspace, just as much as they should encourage enjoying all the opportunities. Exactly the same will be true of robot friends, and of the whole new panoply of augmentation devices.

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Here is a parallel well-known, but we think odd, phenomenon. In the late 1980s, a group of bright young researchers were interested in how the sharing of parental tasks varied across the countries of Europe. A survey of many thousands of eight-year-olds in all the OECD European countries was being undertaken anyway, in their classrooms, so on it they piggy-backed a simple request: tell us who is in your family. The individual eight-year-old would be influenced by who happened to have brought them to school that morning or other recent events, but there were a lot of children in the survey, so the law of large numbers would sort those effects out, and the net result would be a list, in order, of who children of that age in each country considered to be important in their family. The placing on the list would indicate importance in the mind of the typical child. The researchers non-controversially hypothesised, correctly as it turned out, that in every country the average child would be placing Maman, Mutti … at the top of the list, and that Dad would always, on average, be further down. After all, even 30 years ago, very large numbers of children did not live with both parents, usually after a break-up staying with the mother; and anyway the researchers had little doubt that mothers featured more in the daily lives of most children who lived with both their birth parents.

What they did not expect was that, in every country in Europe, when asked to name the important members of their family, eight-year-olds named the family pet. Many eight-year-olds named the family pet before the father. We rush to say (we would, wouldn’t we, after a momentary gulp) that fathers play many key roles, however they may be perceived by the child. Nevertheless, strange though it may sometimes seem, family pets certainly have as good a candidature for the Dunbar 150, or for the actually presumably smaller Dunbar Number that eight-year-olds have. So do Facebook friends. Relationships with animals are real relationships, and lead to measurably higher life satisfaction in some older people in residential care, for instance. So will Alexa.

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Our firm proposition here, which we hope now to illustrate, is this: personal relationships with robots can and very soon will be a real social phenomenon, will exhibit many of the features of the traditional relationships we have evolved to encompass, and will be an important fact in many people’s lives. They will vary from the fantastical through the useful to essential daily support.

So, for example, to go back to our discussion of the care of older people, we can look at Mary Brown, an older woman with some memory loss, the beginnings perhaps of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. She is living on her own: her children have grown up, her husband has died and for all his faults is sadly missed. Her daughter has set up for her one of Amazon’s or Google’s or Apple’s devices. Her first choice: should she ask (say) Alexa to adopt her late husband’s voice? Indeed, to adopt his history, his political and social prejudices? To continue their decades of companionship?

It is, after all, common for bereaved people to converse in some form with the departed loved one, a fact rather beautifully exaggerated into the film Truly Madly Deeply some years ago. An early effort by Anthony Minghella, later to win an Oscar for The English Patient, it portrays an interpreter, played by Juliet Stevenson, who cannot cope with her grief for her late partner, a cellist played by Alan Rickman. He returns fully in the flesh, but presumably a ghost, or alternatively, a fantasy, to both console her and, as it turns out, to annoy her so much with his previous bad habits and some new ones from the nether world, that she soon enough thinks it’s time for him to go. (He is perpetually cold, by implication in contrast to where he now resides, so turns the central heating up to red-hot. He brings a very odd bunch of otherworld drinking pals with him.) Eventually, she cheerfully gets on with her life. He gets on with his death, fading back to wherever, pleased that his plan to disrupt her sadness has worked. Other successful films, alongside the tons of rubbish featuring the undead, involve critical intelligent examination of continuing relationships with dead people, the core difficulty of grief. Notably the Bruce Willis vehicle The Sixth Sense, about a young boy troubled by dead people and the child psychologist of apparently firm existential status who tries to help him. The accumulated wisdom of the more sensitive productions would seem to be this: the only good continuing relationship with a dead person is one that ends rapidly. In California speak, it is essential to ‘move on’.

Does that now change? As the grip of myriad new technologies tightens, dead people are leaving behind ever larger memory stacks. Photos; videos; voicemails, thousands of texts and e-mails. Coming to terms with loss is — is it? — different in the twenty-first century. A task on the to-do list of those who are comfortably off in late middle age has for centuries been, how to set one’s lands in order before the end. Is that last will and testament up to date, are the children going to be alright, who will cherish memorabilia, unpublished manuscripts, rare first editions and Miles Davis LPs, treasured fossils, literal and metaphorical? Often relatives and friends will put their shoulders to the wheel, not merely out of selfishness or expectation. The scope of that task, the management of one’s posthumous existence, may now be immensely extended. Should one curate, if not for posterity in the grand sense, at least for close friends and the next generations of one’s own family, a continuity of one’s apparent self? Stills and videos of one’s physical presence; recordings of one’s voiced opinions; to add to those other fossils?

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the pioneer of photography as art, gnomically said:

We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.

Or, we can if we catch enough of it, well enough, represent, re-present, a carefully curated posthumous version of ourselves. But the underlying principle of access to all that material, however copious, is still as it was before the onrush of smart devices. The living possess, or come across, reminders, and use them to commune with the departed, in part to learn to live without them. This transition has immense extra amounts of material to work with, for most people, whether or not self-curated. The relatives of very prominent people perhaps arrived here before the rest of us. Digital apes cast now a larger shadow than their forebears, housed in the permanence of indestructible numbers.

And now daily robots further challenge that underlying principle, that however cleverly a departure is managed by the departing, it is those left behind who are thereafter active in the relationship. An entity can live in the moment with Mary Brown, in our example, not merely as a memento mori, but in the guise of the man himself, renewing and updating his knowledge, becoming every day the next version of himself, extrapolated from, but not the same as, yesterday’s man, as living people do. The Rubicon is crossed. Or perhaps the relevant river is the Styx. Mary’s husband returns or never leaves,

To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’

‘All’ here being not T. S. Eliot’s biblical reference, but Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web of complete information. The world has begun to worry about how this will work out. The Times technology correspondent Mark Bridge reports, in a piece entitled ‘Good grief: chatbots will let you talk to dead relatives’, on three companies producing chatbots which adopt the voices of the lost loved one. A related leading article opines:

New technology means that old people will be able to record conversations that can help create a digital alter ego which will be activated after their death. Soon it should be possible to conduct a simulated conversation with one’s late mother. While these are intriguing ways of extending the range of artificial intelligence, they are as open to manipulation as table-tapping séances. Who, after all, owns your digital identity? Grief is a powerful feeling, bereavement is as natural a life process as the passing of the seasons. It cannot be wished away by Californian tech-wizards.

‘Ghost in the Machine’, The Times, 11 October 2016

Quite right, too. But nor can tech-wizardry be wished away by the media. The Times itself only survives because Rupert Murdoch, its owner through the then News International, transformed the old Fleet Street in the 1980s. He built an electronic newsroom and press for The Times and related titles in the East End, hired electricians to run it in place of the fractious printers who refused to change their entrenched working practices, and bought a non-unionised trucking company to distribute it, thus cutting out the printers’ allies, the rail unions, who at the drop of a phone call from their comrades would leave the papers behind on the platform.

Let’s suppose, however, that Mary eschews transforming her husband into a different variety of constant companion, and chooses a voice and character sympathetic in different ways, perhaps a woman much like her daughter, but with a unique new friendly voice. She might as well leave her name as Alexa.

Undoubtedly, there will be immediate practical benefits, or changes which appear to be benefits. ‘Alexa, where did I leave my glasses?’ The glasses have an RFID tag, that’s an easy one for Alexa. Who quickly learns that she is only asked that question if Mary moves to another room and at least 20 minutes elapse. From then on, she volunteers the information at 19 minutes without being asked. ‘You’ve left your glasses in the kitchen by the way.’

‘What is there for lunch?’ or even ‘Have I had my lunch, I’m not very hungry?’

‘Actually dear you had lunch an hour ago.’

‘I’m off down the road to see my daughter.’

‘She’s out at work at the moment, she always goes to the office on Thursday afternoon, but she’s coming to see us later on.’

‘I feel like a walk anyway.’

‘Good idea, I’ll come with you on your phone. I’ll just turn the gas out and put the porch light on in case it’s dark when we get back.’

So Mary learns to live with a fresh companion. We simply don’t have enough experience yet, whatever concerns The Times may have, to understand what being close to a robot, a synthetic Other broadcasting and receiving on human channels, actually entails. The Other undoubtedly has the patience of a saint, with far fewer of the saint’s difficult-to-live-with habits, and beats any Jeeves in terms of devotion, comprehensive knowledge, and attention to health and safety. Intuitively, most of us would suspect that, as with pets and Facebook friends, it is a deficient mode of life compared to spending some or all of the day with a traditional friend or colleague. Perhaps not least because, as Sartre himself emphasised, unconditional love is unfortunately hard to distinguish from meaningless sycophancy. But the companionship of a cheerful, uncritical robot may well be a good deal more satisfying than no companionship at all. There must be intrinsic pros and cons, both positive and negative aspects, to the nature of the communication, which after all does not include (at this stage) all the unnoticed or even unknown-to-science features of the presence of another human. Smells and minor noises; pheromones and the rustle of the newspaper; the half-funny remarks and the dropped biscuit. Robots remember your birthday and don’t snore. Is that enough?

There has been about ten years of academic and policy thought into this now. Professor Yorick Wilks and others looked at what they called artificial companions for elders in 2007. In advance, though, of the companions existing, and of what has initially been rather discouraging experience.

A main element has been that there are also extrinsic costs and benefits. In a version of an effect we have noted elsewhere, once this new surrogate daughter is looking after Mum, her relieved actual offspring may feel they can safely visit less often. That is a very real benefit to those children and their families, and to the communities which may want or need to consume the skills they display in their employment, and the products thereof. Clearly it is important that policy-makers should not discount all that.

But experience of the total sum of these new ways of caring (as that is what, in context, they are) is, so far, that the overall net result does not seem to be an improvement in the life of the cared-for person. The disappearance of the average actual caring daughter or son, or professional from the local social services, in the extended version of our example, outweighs the alternatives, where some quality time is replaced in part by the electronic products so far available, in the ways that they have been used so far. Intuitively, again, the billions of people who do find some of that quality time already in Facebook friends, and in text messages from absent but present loved ones, would on the whole expect that a very sophisticated Alexa could surely have a very real positive impact.

Never needing to know where you put your glasses, or whether you locked the door, may unfortunately speed up the loss of the ability to remember such things. People over 50 are encouraged to do crosswords and number puzzles to maintain their cognitive faculties. That is based on solid research; and seems to have some real mitigating effect. Encouraging them, at the same time, not to care about dozens of everyday cognitive tasks feels like a great leap forward which may be a big step backward. On the other hand, mild memory loss, once it has happened, can be deeply debilitating and distressing. And Mary and her late husband probably anyway helped each other to find their glasses. Thus not only increasing the need to do the crossword, to compensate for the lesser intellectual location struggle, but also at the same time enabling the crossword to happen, by ocular improvement. Or to put it less pompously, hellish Others have their uses, and there is firm evidence that the general benefit of another human presence mostly outweighs any downside. Loneliness sucks, and shortens lives.

Many of the effects of new technologies just happen, without formal permission from the authorities, let alone from all of us civilians affected. The general drift is, in the opinion of the authors, as the reader will have gathered, positive on the whole, whilst sometimes terrible externalities fall on significant, even huge, groups. Observation of the social and personal consequences largely happens after the fact. Research into where new forces pulling in different directions actually lead the cognitive abilities of the average older person in the average situation would seem to be a seriously good thing. The research frameworks exist to enable it to happen, and it should, on a wide scale.

A few more words on Mary: one factor militating against the adoption of new technology by older people is that it feels too late, to them, to tangle with something new. Would it not be a good idea to become used to a synthetic person in one’s life 10 years before?

There is an extraordinary and ironic fact here. The present generation of active business people have invented devices that allow universal social contact — there are now as many mobile phones on the planet as there are people — and portable memory so powerful that the one in your pocket gives you instant access to any known fact, and shows you a thousand photos of every aspect of your life. Yet that same generation and all their coevals and families are set on course to suffer from the ills of old age more than any previous, high amongst them social isolation and memory loss. Clearly academics, practitioners, and geeks will, over the next few years, work out ways in which the technology can make a real difference to care needs, as to every other aspect of life. But we are not there yet, a fact in itself puzzling.

Professor Martin Knapp and Jacqueline Damant and other colleagues at the London School of Economics have assessed how far the widespread efforts to apply new technology to the care of old people has reached. So far, the generation that will soon enough suffer more than any previous generation from Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other cognitive impairment is not managing to unambiguously engage those tools to the problems of their parents. It is harder than it might seem, for many reasons. Just one: the needs of family carers are not the same as those of their frail relatives. Let’s imagine that, in 2015, Elizabeth was visited by her daughter every other day, all year long, to make sure she was okay. In 2016, various smart devices were installed, so the daughter and the care agencies would know if Elizabeth fell to the floor, and so she could call a telephone service if she felt ill or anxious. So the daughter then only visited once or twice a week. Elizabeth, of course, cherished meeting her daughter and was uninterested in gadgets. In 2017, her health declined. Equally, financial and other pressures on provider organisations lead to them deploying technology to stay within hard-pressed budgets. The present older generation are less familiar with everyday technology, let alone special devices. Perhaps today’s 50- and 60-somethings will just seamlessly carry their devices with them into older age. Even more then, researchers need to discover how to use the generic stuff, that old people will have used when they were young, rather than special new things. Overall, the present state of play is that smart devices have yet to deliver measurable benefits in improving the quality of life of very frail older people, or decreasing morbidity and mortality. (Actually, with very frail people, happiness and illness are so closely related that objective measures of illness accurately predict unhappiness, and researchers are clear that changes to happiness cause illness.)

Experiments continue, rightly, in all western countries. The NHS in England are conducting a trial in Surrey. Sensors under the bed pick up whether an older person had a restless night; sensors on the lavatory door will indicate if someone is there more often than usual, indicating a urinary tract infection, a key indicator of decline in both mental and physical health; and alert clinicians that they need to be concerned.

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Grant that a constant robot companion, a synthetic Other in a small designer shell, has many minor practical daily uses, switching the heating and lights on and off, firing up the oven an hour before one arrives home, remembering to cancel the newspapers before the family holiday, and so forth. It’s not, to be honest, obvious that the game at that level is worth the candle, although many will find it amusing. A world of self-driving cars will be an undeniably enhanced one, with lower accident statistics, whatever each individual may feel about what may well be a spooky transition. The Amazon Echo and its ilk, on the face of it, might be less efficient day-to-day. The initial cost of the box, plus Alexa on-board on a subscription, plus the price of the stack of WiFi switches and RFID tags on top, plus the time cost of fitting it oneself or the cash cost of paying a specialist contractor, plus … would need to result in an awful lot of time saved and newsagent’s bills minimised. Fun to play with, if you like that kind of thing, but the family calendar does have to be kept up to date — a more complex task in a joint or mixed household — or everything in the house stops working at the wrong moment. Scarcely a brave new world, perhaps not even a better one.

But there are two much bigger selling points. First, the process of voice recognition and response — conversations between Siri and the iPhone owner — is improving fast. Most internet users at present combine the old and new main meanings of the word digital when they use their electronic devices: their fingers type messages onto a screen to interrogate Wikipedia on any item within its phenomenally extensive range. That is amazing if compared to, say, old-fashioned use of an academic library to research the same item. Let alone compared to the average young person at home struggling with their homework, who only 20 years ago might have had a couple of reference books at hand, if they were lucky. But without Siri, the core interaction between brain and knowledge is managed by the individual seeker of truth doing call and response through a keyboard. The average person has, by definition, only averagely effective manual dexterity, and only average ability to manipulate concepts strategically to narrow down exactly what they are looking for and where it might be, however easy the first two or three clicks and insertion of a few words in a search box may be. It works enormously well compared to the previous world, but nowhere near as well as the next world.

Imagine, instead, that Bertie Wooster is looking for information, and leans nonchalantly over Jeeves, who is sitting at the notebook computer in the pantry. Bertie drawls inconsequentially, Jeeves politely makes suggestions about how to find what his master is pursuing, and makes a few silent moves himself to rescue the project. Whilst raising an eyebrow at today’s choice of socks and tie. This is much more effective than Wooster doing it himself. Only the modern labour cost of the downtrodden proletarian domestic servant, lackey of the bourgeoisie, makes it economically and socially inefficient. Siri now charges much less. The point of Bertie is that we all feel superior to him, whilst yearning for the simple arcadia he inhabits. It is a mere by-product that we are therefore not offended by his immovably firm place in a class system we recognise as similar to the one that shines forth on our own clouded hills. And we certainly are much more practised at many tasks, including deployment of that anachronistic web browser. But, to repeat, Siri and Alexa, and even more their young cousins growing up in the laboratories of California and Seattle, have access to far more knowledge and information than Jeeves. And with millions of times greater experience of what people need when searching, of the steps that successful searchers take. Google facilitates, and analyses for research purposes, over 4 billion searches per day. About two thirds of all the searches made by all international search engines put together. They do know how successful searchers do it. In sum, robot companions will not only know everything, they will be deeply experienced in the subtle arts of the discovery and the application of knowledge. It’s scarcely beyond the wits of those geeky digital apes in California to produce keyboard-based versions of the same thing, but voice conversation is a skill intrinsic to human nature, was indeed the borderline between the general run of tool-using hominins and the new species Homo sapiens. It works much better when available. It has now been pretty much mastered by the Other.

The second big selling point is the companionship we discussed in the example of Mary above. Let’s look this time at a young man called John, who we meet first as he removes the dark metal object from its packaging, in this year’s colours of ‘space grey’ or ‘rose gold’ if made by Apple. (Un-packaging is a rite now celebrated for every new gadget in YouTube video form by loving amateurs.) John can rename his Alexa or Siri or Voice as anything he pleases. The name may change over time, evolving with his strategy for this new relationship. We’ll just stick with Siri. Typical emergent strategies might be:

John discovers that what suits him best is a home-based combination of hotel concierge and factotum. The concierge tells him what’s on in town tonight, the quickest route by public transport or Uber. The factotum, a lesser Jeeves, manages his diary and sorts out the central heating and the supermarket deliveries. ‘Hullo, I’m coming up to the front door, let me in would you. Is there any news? Oh, turn the TV on then please.’ More or less what Apple said on the box. It extends a bit over time. In practice, his robot turns into his own private Tonto or Sancho Panza. A friend who goes everywhere with him.

John grieves for his father, amongst much else his strongest supporter over the years. He cloaks his robot assistant in his father’s voice. He is not interested in what the leader writer of The Times fears, a morbid reproduction. If anything, it is a celebration rather than a fake continuation of a former person, layered over a thing useful in different ways. Equivalent, in principle, to a photograph of one’s children on the wall at the office, or on a screensaver. He just wants the daily advice from his robot to use his father’s intonation, and more or less match his father’s worldview and prejudices. He gains a lot from this, but feels no need to categorise or define exactly what.

John yearns for a deep relationship, with a woman, someone rather like the person he imagines a former university friend or colleague has now become. His Siri gradually acquires a physical image in his head, an extension of that young woman’s image, and something like what he remembers of her voice. He’s not a creep. He doesn’t phone her pretending to be the utility company, to get an accurate voice trail. He is quite aware that she is a projection of what might have been, or would never have been, not an actuality. He talks to her about the important things in his life, takes her advice on which shirt to buy online, boasts to her about successes in his career, shares his anger at political events. His feelings about her gradually deepen, not least because she develops a backstory, something like a history and character to go with the superficial personality projected by her voice.

There are much more exotic twists, if anyone wants them. There could be 10 different personae all in the same box, called up by addressing them by name. Parallel lives at present strange to us could emerge. A persona in the box could have many of the features of X, a person reasonably well-known to John, who has consented to be his Siri friend. Analogous with being a Facebook friend in some respects, X is kept informed of the main events in the John/Siri version of the friendship, colludes with that story on the perhaps infrequent occasions when John and X do meet. X could have the reciprocal version in their life with their Siri. John and X would share an augmented friendship, would be listening, consoling, crowing over the sports scores and their team’s victory, but at different times of the day, with the augmented version of the other at their own house, and via the augmented version of themselves at the other’s. We might call this a hybrid friendship. Companies may offer to broker and set up hybrid friendships, either between two existing friends or as part of a new variety of dating agency. They might do an initial afternoon’s training with the apes and the robots to establish the baseline likes and dislikes, shared real and invented history.

All of John’s options here are coherent, conscious relationships, which like any such also incorporate unexpected twists and turns, welcome and not. We should also mention the obvious opportunity for incoherence and bafflement. It is already touching and funny to watch a three-year-old accidently fire up Siri on her eight-year-old sister’s iPad. Confusion and crossness follow as the iPad suddenly acquires a bossy woman’s voice, calls her by her sister’s name, and starts telling her the weather forecast. ‘I don’t want to know that, whoever silly you are!’ But, of course, once there are robots in many homes and public places, new codes of transactional behaviour for people and machines, mostly rules for the machines, will need to be engineered, just as much as the devices themselves need to be engineered, to avoid real distress for the vulnerable, whether young, old or with one sort or another of mental affliction. If there is one thing worse than hearing voices in your head and knowing they are not real, it could be hearing voices in your head and knowing they are real, and that it certainly is the bus stop talking to you and it does know your name and where you went yesterday. Even burglars will need a whole new tool-kit of social jemmies.

Further, there is also the extensive, actually unbounded, new territory of fantasy here, which has been explored in fiction, but now starts to be explored in fact, and really does need some care, proper research, and regulation. John, in the stories above, is engaging in a real ape-robot exchange, and knows he is, although much of his undefined pleasure derives from the robot occupying a space previously reserved for humans. Still, his formal intellectual position is, I’m the human, you are a very useful tool.

John could have opted for the more morbid version of his father as special companion. Mary could have arranged that her late husband should live on, Truly Madly Deeply style, not merely in his voice, but perhaps through a simple screen video of his head with lip sync and appropriate feature movements. Both John and Mary could indeed — a further Rubicon or Styx to be crossed — engage in a full pretence that the old man simply continued, discuss with him what he did at work today. Or, easier to simulate and more credible, act as if he has physically moved on to another place, but can still observe and converse with her as a still-present living being, just as if on a video link, FaceTime perhaps.

This does seem to be problematic in some ways, although not viciously so, mostly because it is difficult to see direct harm to the dead person, nor to any third party. (Granny comes round to see us, but spends half her time talking to the late Grandpa on her phone. Scarcely major collateral damage.) Both Jeeves and Wooster are pretend. Suppose Wooster is real, but Jeeves stays fictional, but they have much the same relationship. What is the ethical difference? Well, of course a physically present person is different from the same person on the phone or in messages, but again, no collateral damage. If Bertie wants to believe in his, to be fair, pretty convincing and astonishingly clever, imaginary friend, it’s not the daftest of his habits.

A celebrity might well be happy to be a standard voice for Alexa, and more besides. But what about the girl who did not care for Fred at all, who recognised him only in his teenage dreams, but now finally does speak out loud to him every day, because he devised a way of recording her voice? Does that third party have a choice about participation in a parallel life? And that parallel life might occasionally meet your everyday existence, the real girl recognise you at a social event and … embarrassment? The unreconciled divorced man whose Siri has his former wife’s voice, to the bemusement of the children when they visit?

There is certainly an interesting version of hybrid friendship that could help frail older people. Telecare is a well-established aid to sustaining them in their own homes, rather than having to transfer to some more institutional setting. A variety of devices are installed, usually including speakerphones in the house, which enable an operative in the equivalent of a call centre to offer help. This ranges from simply having a chat with a confused or lonely person who phones after waking in the middle of the night, to responding to a monitored lack of activity, or to an alarm worn around the neck whose button has been pressed after a fall. There would seem to be real scope for a hybrid friendship, in which Alexa is a constant companion, but gives way to a live human if necessary. In the simplest mode, Alexa would simply notice that one of a few trigger conditions had been met: no response to everyday chat, or unintelligible chat, or unexpected location, like remaining in a bathroom for far longer than usual. At that point, Alexa would alert the telecare centre, as happens every day now, and they would take over. There could be a more complex hybrid mode, in which the distant carer took over Alexa and her voice, seamlessly, so that they were, in effect, one Other as far as the older person was concerned.

*

And a particular niche, which has to be mentioned. There has been much chatter for years about the percentage of the World Wide Web that is devoted to pornography, with assertions of a third and a half being bandied about. The most accurate estimates seem to be that only around 13 per cent of searches and only 4 per cent of traffic is pornography related. (In the western languages, on the western search engines, so predominantly, but not exclusively American English on Google.) There are severe estimation problems, and 13 per cent of around 6.5 billion searches per day worldwide is still pretty much a billion pornography searches per day. Not counting the half of the world outside the western language web. Not counting the so-called Dark Web. Which is not at all nothing, but neither is it a half. Readers will take their own moral view of this. (If a billion digital apes a day are engaged in an activity, sociologically it’s a deeply embedded digital ape activity.) Our point here is that a significant proportion of fantasy robots may have a tinge of sexuality built in, others may display utter perversion. There is no basis for a forecast of the extent of this, but the extent of pornography on the web might be a very crude indicator.

A consistent theme in robot, and cyborg and android, fiction (another reason to avoid the title The Naked Robot) has been the idea that people — almost certainly predominantly men — might ask human simulators for something more than to always be able and willing to perform straightforward vanilla sex, plus all legal variations thereof. Unlawful, hard-to-obtain sex acts could be available, and all without moral connotation since distressing a machine can scarcely be a crime or a breach of the respect for persons at the basis of coherent ethics. No person, no offence. That very popular reboot of Westworld as a TV series had a range of attractive warm-blooded humans pretending to be robots. They were attractive humans pretending to be robots attractively pretending to be humans offering highly real up-close-and-personal warm-blooded services.

Ex Machina has strong, eventually dominant, female characters, who in the story are machines, but are played by attractive female apes, who spend a good deal of their time in variations of sexually alluring the two male characters. And that is one of the things the audience is looking for, and overlaps with one of the main reasons that projections of possible future robots often discuss both biological and non-biological flesh substitutes.

In sum, our prediction here has to be that relationships with robots will, yes, be a significant part of the lives of a significant minority of the planet’s population. But we also predict that those relationships will not merely be functional, master to manservant in Wodehouse speak. They will augment the full breadth of imaginary and real friendships, greater projections if you like of a common childhood fantasy into diverse adult realities, relationships which will include both strong platonic bonds, and many varieties of sexuality. These behaviours will extend also into virtual reality games, processes, and tools. The philosophical ontological status as objects of the partners, sexual or otherwise, will be clear: they will be robots. The status of the relationship is as yet unknowable. But it will be a real part of the lives of many digital apes.

It matters little whether we the authors approve or disapprove of the sex, violence, politics, tastelessness of any that. The strong preventative moral argument would, we think, be the long-standing one of whether reading about particular acts, seeing them enacted on a screen, encourages the reader or viewer to carry out those acts in real life. As we have indicated, we think imitation humans consistently able to seriously pass even in carefully muted lighting for the real thing are an unlikely development in the near future. But convincing voice robots can be placed in moving dolls of one sort or another.

Then, to be brutal about one aspect, will allowing machines to simulate children as sex toys, in one form or another, divert the mostly men who want to engage in that perversion away from human children? And will it increase or decrease the number of men interested in that perversion? Saying we hate the idea of an activity so we are going to ban it outright has yet to work in any relevant field, and is unlikely to work in this one. It is entirely possible that making even semi-convincing child-shaped robot sex toys, or virtual reality games, easily available might radically reduce the number of children at risk of vile exploitation. But is this something we could easily countenance?

It would seem obvious that the principle involved in the above example surely cannot revolve around how convincing the doll-like robot may be. But it is conceivable that, in other contexts, that would be the only question. In a future world, in which robots are common, a woman’s neighbours boast to her constantly that they have installed an utterly convincing vastly expensive robot butler. She meets it several times, is completely persuaded, although does notice, as anyone would when on the lookout, that from time to time it’s a bit clunky and mechanical. Then one day she goes round to borrow a cup of sugar. The robot butler, in the absence of its owners, is rude to her. So she picks up a heavy vase and bashes it on the head. Only when she is covered with sticky grey matter does she work out that her neighbours have taken the cheaper option of employing an out-of-work actor part-time. A rather wooden performer sometimes.

Who has committed what offence here? It might be criminal damage to wilfully smash up a robot. But it can’t be murder. To repeat, the present authors don’t think we get to the point of life-like pseudo-human bodies for a very long time yet. What we do think is that the principles are already the same in the extended robots we already have, and need to be elaborated. To take an example in a similar field, if Alexa is asked to help to plan a murder or a bank robbery, should she refuse? If she overhears such a conversation, should she quietly ring the police?

Perhaps we should lastly take a cue from Morris’ contrast between our attitudes to our brains as opposed to our bodies, quoted in our first chapter. That we are an ape that spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones. Having spent some time on the latter, we should point out that it is already easy to ask Siri or Alexa about (say) Einstein, and ask them to quote Wikipedia. There are a number of recordings of Einstein’s voice. Within the next couple of years, Siri will be able to speak in his voice, or in that of any other Nobel Prize-winner of the past hundred years or so. And therefore possible to summon up Einstein to read out Wikipedia or other entries about Brownian motion, or Hemingway to read one of his accounts of bullfighting, or Bob Dylan about song writing. Alternatively, such questions as Siri can already answer about the views of those individuals on the relevant topics, can be answered in the relevant voice. It will soon be possible to summon up a reasonably good imitation of major figures, good and bad, interrogate them, and receive a fair simulacrum of the answers they would have given, in their familiar vocal tones, using, if one prefers to see one’s interlocutor, something like a FaceTime video constructed from photographs or film, with lip-syncing. In other words, quite soon an enterprising company will arrange for us to speak with the dead, or the just elusive, unavailable, or expensive.

We might, in the same way, have a different kind of expert on tap, not simply spouting their pre-digested wisdom, but solving problems in real time. The health services of several countries now offer telephone consultation, at least as an initial triage, giving simple solutions to simple ailments. There will be no more expert diagnostician than a deep mind trawl through the ever increasing collections of transcripts of such telephone consultations, matching stated symptoms with final diagnoses. A reassuringly voiced robot may soon be having the initial discussion. Expert clinicians in teams of digital apes and robots can pick up later.

And that goes direct to two aspects of the core of the nature of the digital ape, and why we coin that term. First, Homo sapiens has always been the most effective animal ever, by a long chalk, at social relations because our highly sophisticated language skills enable a far greater and deeper range of relationships, and, in particular but by no means exclusively, the coordination of those relationships to engage in parallel and sequential tasks. We have, since before the industrial revolution, then intensively since, been able to use the matching cognitive skills to coordinate tools to work without them being in our hands, indeed, without us being present. Waterwheels and windmills, for instance, have been around for at least two millennia. Only now are we able to coordinate them using our physical Homo sapiens communication channels of voice and interpretative gesture. There is a difference of degree, surely, in pressing a button to start a machine and, say, clapping one’s hands in a pre-arranged fashion. One is using symbolic communication, the other is just … pressing a button.

Second, after three million years of tool use by hominins, the present phase involves a sea change in the nature of the tools which are integral to our being, as they were to Homo habilis and other tool users. They now encompass non-human tools playing human roles, knowing, advising, cooperating. Treating people as objects is an ancient mode, as instanced perhaps in slavery, or in factory workforces. Social machines, as we have described, are the obverse of Dickens’ blacking factory or Henry Ford’s early plants at Dearville. In the industrial setting, the humans are cogs designed into a machine, using cognitive skills to contribute to the mechanical product. In the social machines, intelligent mechanisms contribute to a social intellectual product. We will discuss Professor Luciano Floridi’s work later, but a point he makes about animism is relevant here, too. In many pre-industrial societies, vegetable or mineral objects have been treated as if they were animal, assumed to be consciously involved in projecting themselves into, and playing out their own motives in, our human world. Machines, as the Other, have now made those myths actual. They will rapidly become an intrinsic part of the digital ape’s habitat. Our Darwinian adaptation to that environment may, in part, depend on the rules we consciously create for it. The good life might require a rule something like, A thing should say what it is and be what it says. Difficult to see that working out just fine, but there you are.

A broader version of this will be applied to lots of objects in the digital ape’s life. There will be sensor tags of some sort, with the ability to communicate, on everything of interest. This is the Internet of Things, a network of everyday items that can either manage themselves or operate quasi-independently according to rules set by the digital ape. Her house will have access to her diary and will know how to behave on work days, on weekends, when it is empty at holiday time, or when she is abroad. The home’s ambient intelligence will be convenient much of the time and will sometimes be a lifesaver. The fridge will know when to order butter from the supermarket, the floor will phone social services if Granny has a fall.

Our firm prediction, because it is simply a projection forward of where hundreds of millions of people are today: the digital ape will have purely digital relationships, of an increasing variety, many of them deep and fulfilling. With pure robots; through social media with both real and imaginary friends; including deep relationships with real people whom one does not in real life know at all.

*

Further, we are at the beginning of enhancements embedded in our bodies that will boost our senses: implants that will sharpen sound, vision, and more. As enhancement extends its scope, there will be difficult questions: when does my enhanced self stop being me? Who decides who has access to augmentation? Should the digital ape forbid some augmentation for some individuals? Even, in the odd extreme case, make augmentation compulsory?

Virtual reality increasingly uses our repertoire of gestures, facial and bodily movements, balance mechanisms and movements. And, of course, our aural and visual capacities. Devices are beginning to incorporate touch, pressure on and from hands and other body parts, and vibration (so-called haptic facilities), and in principle could use smell, although intuitively to the amateur that seems harder to deliver.

If we for a moment assume that a person’s personhood resides in their head, there are already available many medically proven ways to replace the support, in every sense of the word, given by the rest of the body. Major organ transplant techniques were pioneered by heart surgeon Professor Christiaan Barnard and his patient Louis Washkansky in 1967. Knowledge of how to prevent rejection of alien organs is now well advanced. Absurd and horrid options therefore exist, and nobody seriously intends to advance or implement them. It might (utterly wrongly) sound easy enough for scientists to swap the heads and bodies of identical twins, who after all have near identical DNA, and therefore strong immunity to rejection even without the well-practised drug regime. Why on earth would they? Okay, one of a pair of twins is involved in a terrible car crash and is dying from inoperable head injuries but is otherwise unscathed. His sister is already in hospital with widespread terminal cancer … But those possibilities have little to do with the future of the human race, and will be little, if ever, used. Cloning a brain into another body? The mad evil scientist in a James Bond film may be up for that, but the rest of us aren’t. And much of me is predicated on years of this brain learning about the shape and capacities of this body and this nervous system. A completely new body on the same old head would not be a simple swap, like a new set of tyres for a car. Every emotion, every sense of belonging and movement, might be seriously compromised, at least temporarily.

Nevertheless, in the lifetimes of today’s young children it will be a practical proposition to replace practically every body part, by using stem cells to regrow them. We doubt this will be a widespread practice. Corporate executives will not be a given a pair of stem-cell-grown new legs as a retirement present instead of a gold watch. But kidney transplants, to take an obvious example, are not unusual now. There are insufficient donors and difficult variables in the transfer. Kidneys grown from stem cells will be a better option, and rightly adopted.

That will be one way to support a human brain with a different body. What about a fascinating alternative, the cyborg? Cyborgs would, if they existed, be human beings enhanced by biomechanical replacement of limb, organ, or whole body. First mooted in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, these again have a 60-year-long history in science fiction and speculative writing, and have become a familiar trope in television and films.

Has anything like TV’s Six Million Dollar Man ever been built? (Or do we mean born? Adapted? Cut and shut?) If so, DARPA, Elon Musk, or the Chinese secret service have neglected to advertise the fact. In a lesser sense, perhaps by cyborg we might mean a human with mechanical added bits. We have those already. Many people use wheelchairs, hearing aids, heart pacemakers. Stephen Hawking had a non-human voice. The distinguished evolutionary biologist and geneticist John Maynard Smith used to joke about his utter dependence on his spectacles. If we adopt a tougher definition, a cyborg is a combined man and machine, in which the mind would stop if the machine stopped. Heart pacemakers are some of the way there.

The more radical developments in pervasive computing are coming from wearable technology. Much augmented ‘collective memory’, direction finding, and weather warnings, which were all available first on your PC, then on your smartphone, will soon be built in to your clothes or your spectacles. They are currently being rolled out to early adopters. Many people now wear wrist devices that monitor their movements and pulse rates, and deduce how many calories they burn and the patterns of their nightly sleep. Rather uncomfortable T-shirts with similar functions are also on the market. In 2015, just as Google toned down its experiment with Google Glass — a computer screen in a pair of eyeglasses — Apple added an expensive watch to its range. Both of these moves are about present-day fashions, not the future of technology. People who feel daft in geeky eyewear — or who worry that others will think their online profile is also being watched — will not, in 2015, baulk at a snazzy watch. The steps towards smaller wearable devices — the watch taps the wearer’s wrist to alert them to hot news — continue apace. Next will be wearable cognition-enhancers; implanted chips perhaps, although there will doubtless also be non-invasive options.

We are fast approaching a time where all of the power of massive data-processing can be embodied at every level, from huge defence computers to an individual person’s body, with all the levels able to communicate with each other, constantly and instantaneously. Everywhere, the race is on for precision and personalisation. The problem solving has data enough to deliver solutions exquisitely customised to an individual’s pattern of like. It follows that decisions, changes, and unexpected disasters at one level can have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences at all the others.

As we write this in 2018, an individual who uses wearable technology to the full, and who takes cognitive enhancement drugs, will experience, for a while, an utterly different world from any available before, at home and at work. It is, plainly, a disturbing notion, the stuff of science fiction, that such enhancement might become commonplace. We condemn sports men and women when they use drugs to improve their performance. Will we apply that to traders in the financial markets? To students taking exams? Do rich parents have the right to buy expensive kit and chemicals for their children? If a drug makes an airline pilot more likely to cope well with a sudden emergency, should we insist they use it? We already insist they should have safety-rated instruments on flightdecks. What is the difference?

Our problem with the cyclist taking inappropriate medicines before an event is twofold. Yes, it’s a competition, with rules; breaking the rules is cheating; and can motivate all the other competitors to take drugs, too. In bodybuilding, they have competitions for people who take steroids, and competitions for people who don’t take steroids. Which either reduces or doubles the policing problem. Mainly, though, all drugs and medicines involve degrees of danger and side-effect, and if we regulate popular sports in a way that requires anyone with a chance of winning to be dosed-up, then syllogistically we are regulating for a dosed-up population. So at first glance, if Yo-Yo Ma is happy to inject or swallow chemicals which will enhance his playing, then his audience just gets a better deal. Except that then the music profession as a whole has to start doing the same, and within a short time young aspirants in the conservatoire are on their way to the emergency ward.

The same would seem to be true of school and college exams. And driving tests and aeroplane pilot’s exams. The aim, surely, is to measure, in so far as that is possible, the capabilities of applicants. We do not, of course, insist that optically challenged pilots or mathematicians remove their spectacles. We have incrementally allowed more and more aids to memory to be brought into college exams; examiners who 20 years ago were unhappy for undergraduates to bring calculators to tests now permit straightforward, slightly old-fashioned devices, thus, arguably, abandoning checking whether young wranglers can actually add up, let alone know how tangents and cosines work. Examiners draw the line at modern programmable ones. The latter get too close to just answering the question on the paper. This seems, on balance, sensible, perhaps gets close to testing mental agility. In a world in which everyone has complete geography and history at their smartphone fingertips, it is not obvious why the only people not allowed access to that material would be the young people most interested in it. Or, to be more precise, since simply nobody can rote learn a millionth part of Wikipedia, testing precisely how much less than one millionth a particular young person can remember might seem now to be missing the point. Whatever we want to competitively test now in a geographer, it can’t be whether they know how to click on Google Earth.

The majority of us who have not yet committed so fully to ‘enhancement’ can also experience the early shoots of profound change. Teenagers are constantly in touch with others via text and other messaging. Personal information — in pictures, in words — is permanent and collective, whether we like it or not. Grieving, growing up, impressing a future employer, being the subject of a biography after you are dead, have all changed already for most westerners.

The film Minority Report, made in 2002, has a nonsense premise about two or three special people in the near future with the ability to see bad events which are about to happen. The special people have lived all their life in some kind of bathtub, yet are familiar enough with the everyday world to … well it’s absurd, but fun to watch. It portrays a world of interactive devices and smart videophones, super-fast computers and intelligent highways, not far distant from what one suspects the Apple and Google laboratory geeks envisage for us. It feels dystopian, despite the superficial attractive gloss of rooms and towns where every surface is intelligent.

Again, much more research is needed on what universal access to complete information does to us. We need to closely monitor the nature of the enhancements, technological and pharmaceutical, being developed, the world they presage, and describe the rules we need to make for ourselves about all of these changes. Of course we have had enhancement of our basic cognitive functions for a very long time. Telescopes and spectacles, hearing aids. But very soon we will have extensions to, augmentation of, every part of our cognition: memory retention, recall, recognition. A wider variety of government agencies than the average citizen might assume already have the capacity to watch the flow of thousands of people in the big cities, and recognise a high proportion of the faces. Ordinary citizens in the West will soon be able to do that: sit opposite the entrance to a football stadium or a big office block wearing internet-enabled spectacles and listen through the earpiece to a recitation of the names of all the fans or workers. Why would anyone bother? Exactly the same set of reasons that over the past couple of years have driven those many thousands of Russians to use VKontakte.

This capacity, in a lighter form, is the substrate for the changes now starting. We need to appreciate they are on the way and what the consequences are for our social norms, regulations, and possibly laws.

Information overlays in principle surround us. Your insurance company may insist that the fabric of your house has chips, to tell you if it is damp, feeling the heat of a fire — or has just not been painted in the past five years, as your lease requires. (And then ask you if you would like to be connected to information about how infrequently leases have been revoked for non-painting.) The washing machine may nudge your portable device to tell you it has now finished its cycle, or a projected display overlay on the kitchen wall tell you — chat to you if you want — about all your household devices, their maintenance condition, how well stocked they are, where the dishwasher is in its cycle. That will be optional. Your driverless car will have no choice but to alert you to stacking delays caused by bad weather (the main difficulty in driving, the foolish behaviour of all the other drivers, will soon go).

Language translation is important here. The digital divides — rich versus poor nations, the connected and still unconnected in the western states — are exacerbated, or perhaps just underpinned, by patterns of linguistic dominance, or hegemony. Over 90 per cent of the web is composed in only 13 languages. Sounds a lot, until you remember that there are around 6500 languages in the world. Yes, native speakers of 10 of them account for at least half the world’s population, and 2000 of the languages are spoken by only hundreds or low thousands of speakers. But if you net all of that out, there is still about a third of the world speaking minority languages, who have much poorer web citizen opportunities.

Smart translation software does exist, of course. Babelfish.com. Google Translate. Even these work best at present between the dominant languages. Fridges that talk will talk in English and Mandarin before Yoruba or Malayalam.

We have begun to be surrounded by ambient proactive technology. This will increase. Economically and technically, there is no reason why every article of your clothing would not include RFID or successor devices. And be able to tell you its location, its state of disrepair, whether it had been worn since last washed, whether there are sufficient used clothes in the laundry basket or on the kids’ bedroom floor to justify a wash. They would speak these things to you.

Does all this spell a change of gear for education? Why bother with rote learning of multiplication tables or history dates? Every phone knows nearly all the history known to the human race. It will soon count the apples on a tree for you, guess their individual and collective weight, offer you recipes for strudel. Your kitchen will measure out the ingredients and manage the cooker on a quiet command. Much will be voice activated. Information overlays on practically everything we are surrounded by in urban life will project to us. The balance of writing and speech will change, just as the proportion of performance and discovery in art has increased. Spoken language will reappear rather than the written word in many situations. A step back to a previous state, interestingly.

Which may lead to a different emotional and ideological context to our relationship with things. At present the virtual and informational world is something we opt in to. It begins now to be something that actively presents to us, not passive. Oxford Professor Luciano Floridi:

Older generations still consider the space of information as something one logs-in to and logs-out from. Our view of the world (our metaphysics) is still modern or Newtonian: it is made of ‘dead’ cars, buildings, furniture, clothes, which are non-interactive, irresponsive, and incapable of communicating, learning, or memorizing. But in advanced information societies, what we still experience as the world offline is bound to become a fully interactive and more responsive environment of wireless, pervasive, distributed, a2a (anything to anything) information processes, that works a4a (anywhere for anytime), in real time. Such a world will first gently invite us to understand it as something ‘a-live’ (artificially alive). This animation of the world will, paradoxically, make our outlook closer to that of pre-technological cultures, which interpreted all aspects of nature as inhabited by teleological forces.

Information: a very short introduction, 2010

This magic may take some interpretation before we assimilate it, and impact on different cultures in different parts of the world in very different ways. There will be no sentient machines any day soon, but our relationship is already deepening and broadening with our intelligent, augmented, gadgets and habitat.