We are associated on a daily basis with artificial intelligence. As I type on this keyboard, my analogue self is "conversing" with a digital program that translates my strikes from zeroes and ones into words and sentences.

Robots these days vacuum floors, weld and paint cars on the assembly line or amuse us as robot pets. IBM's chess program, Deep Blue, was smart enough to beat chess champion Gary Kasparov. The Internet and the World Wide Web are still more examples of artificial intelligence that span the whole world in a digital way. Google is smart enough to bring up just those Web pages we have in mind when we ask a question of it. Yet, while these digital examples perform a myriad of tasks for us, we are quite certain that such digital entities are far distant from human consciousness and abilities.

But there are a group of futurists who believe that artificial intelligence will develop a shocking and, for most of us, an unimaginable potency. I will attempt to summarize their arguments.

Gordon Moore, the former CEO of Intel, the computer chip maker, opined that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years. The circuits would then double in efficiency and computing power would quadruple. Computer buyers are experiencing this "law" as their ability to buy a lot more computer power for less money. But there must be an end point to this doubling. Eventually, the number of transistors will be just a few atoms apart and further expansion will be physically impossible.

Ray Kurzweil, a leading protagonist of high-powered artificial intelligence, predicts that a paradigm shift will follow that gives new life to Moore's law. That will happen due to the progress of miniaturization. Nanotechnology, the use of tiny machines of molecular size, will replace transistors and rapid progress will ensue. How rapid? So rapid that computers within a few decades will exhibit intelligence that not only matches the human, but exceeds it by a factor of millions. This will happen, Kurzweil claims, because the neural connections in the human brain are far slower than evolved electronic circuits. How much slower? I quote Kurzweil: "One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than the human brain." An example given by Kurzweil to support his prediction of exponential technical progress is the time required for decoding the human genome. It was assumed to require thousands of years, but the job was complete in less than 15.

By mid-century, Kurzweil estimates, the human brain will have been mapped by nanotubes that explore its capillaries and send back data to an artificial intelligence program. That program will then use its light-speed connections to produce a super-human intelligence that will merge ordinary reality with virtual reality. The human species will have been transformed - analogue and digital worlds will have merged into one transcendent intelligence. Human reality will have become far richer, deeper and expansive.

Is all this science fiction or science fact? It's neither. Arthur Clarke, the author whose work was adapted for the film "2001: A Space Odyssey," was no scientist. And Hal, that nasty super-computer, was fictional. But Kurzweil and his colleagues are serious scholars and their predictions deserve serious attention.

Even if this technological imperative does not arrive on time and proves not to be as potent as its adherents imagine, it is evident that high technology will impact the future of humans alive today in profound ways. Already military robots that fly the skies and robotic "soldiers" that march into battle are on the drawing boards. Warfare will wear a very different technical face. Those now addicted to computer gaming and mobile phone texting will find themselves in a new world where virtuality and reality come together and ordinary human experience is transcended utterly.

Will the coming technological revolution be limited to the benign purposes of the good guys of the world? Probably not. Terrorists and rogue nation-states will have easy access to the new technology. Are there statesmen (or women) in our future who will find ways to contain the evil that technology can wreak while implementing the good it can produce? I hope so.