Such intelligence is now being extended to the garage forecourt for the replenishment of fuel, detection of spillages and the maintenance of pumping equipment. The automatic call for replenishment of food and commodity dispensing machines at airports, stations and in the high street is an even more recent development.

The logistic advantages of this technology are subtle and significant. Visiting sites only when necessary saves time, resources and money, but topping up machines in response to exceptional demand means sales opportunities are not missed. Drinks machines sell more when it is hot, and are soon emptied by flight and train delays, traffic jams and sporting events. In the not too distant future we might expect this capability to be an integral part of homes, home appliances, cars and body-worn devices.

In Britain today, two per cent of the population are diabetic, and even more are on other forms of drug treatment. Ideally, these people require constant monitoring and care, and represent a significant workload for the healthcare system. As technology extends our longevity, and as the birth rate declines, we face a future of increasing numbers of dependent people, and a diminishing number of carers. In the 21st century, we will have an older population and far fewer people working and creating wealth, so some new technological solutions will be necessary.

With future wearable electronics it is feasible that the fundamental monitoring of heart, respiration, blood pressure, skin, salinity and blood glucose and other characteristics can be provided in real time. Such features could become a part of the office you wear coupled to algorithms that maintain the right balance of insulin through an artificial pancreas or drug balance through automatic dispensers.

But it does not stop here, what about the technology that wears us? The number of internal body part replacements is accelerating and they are increasingly electronic, or mechatronic in form. It is inconceivable that we should give an office copying machine the intelligence to call for help when it is about to fail, and yet neglect the pacemaker or artificial heart on which so many lives depend.

In the research laboratories of the world there are already artificial replacements for the pancreas, the liver, the kidneys, the inner ear and other vital organs. In the ultimate analysis my seven-year-old son spotted the really obvious. Today we have donor cards for all real human tissue parts replacement. The logical extension is a donor card so that our artificial heart, kidneys or other replacement parts may also be recovered and used by others. The ultimate extrapolation really is donor cards for robots.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk