In a new book called Predictions, some of the world's greatest thinkers present a vision of the future with overtones of a science fiction film. Futuristic author Arthur C Clarke and others suggest that a new life form. will evolve from artificially intelligent machines. Humans vying for dominance will turn to genetics and cryogenics to compete. Clarke, although he is seen as a visionary, has got it wrong before. There's no sign of Hal the dominating computer from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (written by Arthur C Clarke) appearing on the horizon next year to dominate human life. Even so, computers have changed the way that we work and play. The Internet is changing business, seemingly sweeping everything along on an e-tide. The Web will change the way we work—more of us will work from home. Futurist Ian Pearson sees a convergence between intelligent computers and biotechnology, the advent of implanted chips and enhanced intelligence. Both machines and humans will have access to a global net with instant access to the world's knowledge. But Pearson also fears that it could divide the world into two classes—those with access to this knowledge and those without access. And obviously there is a risk in losing control of things that think. Pearson expects machines to be as smart as humans by 2015. After that, computers will continue to get smarter. The trouble with the digital revolution, says MIT Media Lab director Neil Gershenfeld in his book When Things Start to Think, is that computers may have speeded up many of the proceses of modem life, but they still remain relatively difficult to use. 'Most computers are nearly blind, deaf and dumb,' says Gershenfeld. 'These inert machines channel the richness of human communication through a keyboard and mouse. The speed of the computer is increasingly much less of a concern than the difficulty in telling it what you want it to do, or in understanding what it has done, or in using it where you want to go, rather than where it can go.' What's needed now, he concludes, is digital evolution. The real challenge is how to create systems with many components that can work together and change, merging the physical world with the digital world. 'If we can manage the development so that they (thinking machines) stay our friends, in just a few years we'll see progress in every area of life that makes the preceding millennia look like we've all been asleep.' Evolution is a consequence of interaction, says Gershenfeld. 'And information technology is profoundly changing how we interact. Therefore it's not crazy to think about the impact of this on evolution.' From paragraph 4, we can deduce that_____.