What will the world really look like when robots are doing everything for us?

If you’re the sort of person who looks to the future with hope, and thinks that AI might be the solution to all our problems, then this might be the book for you. At the same time, if you regard the arrival of AI with all the enthusiasm you had previously reserved for nuclear oblivion, then this might be the book for you as well. It’s simultaneously an optimistic peer into the crystal ball and a dire warning as to what might be to come.

Scenes like this are still a while away…

Joel Levy has degrees in molecular biology and psychology and has written more than 40 books, mainly of popular science. Here he has his futurologist’s hat on, and his book focuses on what the future might hold for you as you go about your daily life a few years or decades from now. Levy thinks it might be 15-30 years before we are breakfasting with robots, in the sense of having a robot butler taking care of all our breakfasting needs. As Levy puts it, ‘as long as a human can do the job better for less money, robots will not thrive’.

In the future, though, it is hoped that ‘for some elements, such as its hands and fingers, the butler could deploy fluidic artificial muscles in soft-fabric housing’. There’s a lot of this sort of writing, which probably means something to someone, somewhere.

‘As you leave the shower, the roboslugs emerge from their hidden charging stations and start gliding up and down the tiles and shower screen, paying special attention to the grout. All the debris, dirt and biofilm they scour off is fed into their bioreactors to power their daily round – once you’ve installed them, you never need to think about them again.’ Until the roboslugs take over the world and we are all kneeling in supplication to the Emperor Roboslug I, whose bathrooms are kept clean by human slaves armed with J-cloths.

Instead of cleaning our teeth we shall swill a nanobot mouthwash, in which millions of tiny bots have been programmed to clean our teeth and gums.

Levy thinks we’ll end up commuting by rocket: Singapore will be just 40 minutes away. He’s all for driverless cars, which seem to me a terrifying prospect. But he doesn’t think that jetpacks will ever be widely available. ‘They are extremely expensive, have significant safety concerns, are limited in usability and range and mostly require special training to use.’ The only feasible response to which is: ‘Phew!’

In the main this is a sober and thoughtful book that lets the reader think for himself. Not that we’ll be allowed to do that in a while: AI will do all our thinking for us…