Hundreds of products are in development at BT's labs and yet, according to Professor Peter Cochrane, who heads the division, what you see on a day's visit is "slightly less than 1%" of what's really going on. For a man in charge of arguably one of the most innovative, technologically cutting-edge laboratories in the world, Cochrane looks very ordinary. He wears a dark suit and tie; his hair is neat and he speaks in a quiet, rather monotonous voice that wouldn't be out of place in a funeral parlour. But when you home in on some of the detail, you start to spot anomalies.

His wristwatch is the first giveaway. It is a larger than average futuristic device that looks as if it would be more at home on the stage set of Star Trek. Then you notice his James Bond-style signet ring. Cochrane says there is a chip that includes every piece of personal information about him that anyone would ever wish to know. It quadruples up as passport, credit card, driving licence and cheque book, and that's just the basics.

Why even bother to wear a ring, he asks. Why not just get the chip planted inside you somewhere? There would be no security concerns because you'd never lose it. He wants one in his bottom, and he's not joking. By now, of course, you realise that Cochrane is no ordinary man at all. He is one of those rare people who eats, sleeps and breathes technology.

Getting your head around his ideas is easier said than done. The crux of his argument centres on the transition of our telecoms network from a static, hierarchical man-made system, into a living and breathing organism which adapts and evolves by applying the exact genetic principles as our own biological systems.

"What happens when we have customers who introduce their own services every few hours?" Cochrane asks. "What happens when every chocolate bar dispenser, every cola machine, every Xerox machine, every gas station, is online? The network won't cope. And the only way it will adapt is for it to live. If the network is not alive, and I mean alive as in you and I, then we'll be dead in the water."

He points to the fact that there are about 5.6 billion people on this planet and about 13 billion microprocessors. So the chips are having more conversations online every day than mankind has ever had, cumulatively, all the way back to the creation of Adam and Eve. There is now more data stored on computers, he says, than was ever put on paper. The big question is: how are we going to navigate that world?

"It's like standing under Niagara Falls with your mouth open," he explains. "The information flow is so huge, you'd never be able to find anything. One thing is for sure, it will require a different mendacity and a new type of software." If the network is the living organism, then the software that manages it is the DNA. BT is developing the technology that will allow software to behave in the same way as biological systems. Rather than solving problems in a static manner, it is working on programs that "breed" software capable of automatically adapting to change, as nature does, and using intuitive reasoning to anticipate problems and mistakes before they occur.

This "soft", or biological, computing can reduce costs, improve reliability and enhance performance. By creating what is known as progenitor programs, the software can reproduce itself and give rise to offspring, which in turn can breed to produce more intelligent generations. "We've discovered that the optimum number of sexes is four, not two as in humans," Cochrane explains. "We let the parents mate and discard the children that don't perform as well. But if the children outperform the parents, we shoot the parents and let the children propagate.

"Sex in this sense is a euphemism. It's merely a mechanism for getting material together to create new life. So in the software world, it's a mechanism of getting software together to create new, better solutions." The software, he says, will become so intelligent that it will be able to anticipate your next need. Currently, these so-called "software agents" are incredibly crude, but one day they'll be so sophisticated that they'll have every piece of information ready for when we need it.