Future visions

SCIENCE fiction is fast becoming science fact. Not so much Things To Come - the 1936 film of HG Wells' futuristic stroy that follows Visions Of The Future on BBC4 - as Things Just Around The Corner if presenter Dr Michio Kaku is to be believed.

He points to the rise in computing power.

The IBM 1401 was a state-of-the-art computer in the Sixties. It filled an entire room, cost £1m in today's money and managed 4,000 calculations a second. Then he holds up a modern mobile phone, costing about £50, with a microchip the size of your fingernail and able to do one billion calculations a second.

Computing power doubles every 18 months. Soon there will be microchips with everything. These pieces of artificial intelligence will be running our lives, provided we can become masters of these machines.

Kaku avoids debating the moral, ethical and social consequences of chips taking over our lives.

He is only concerned with the practical advantages as new technology reshapes today's civilisation.

He takes a trip in a car that drives itself, which can find its way and avoid obstacles.

This will stop for old ladies crossing the road and avoid those arguments with your partner over whether to turn left or right at the next crossroads.

The self-drive car does it all with the processing power of eight desktop computers.

Scientists call this sort of thing "ubiquitous computing".

Monitoring our health will be as cheap as chips. Microchips will be built into every product we buy. They'll be in walls, furniture, clothing. The Big Brother implications are immense, but ignored by the good doctor.

He imagines a chip in our clothes could be a personal doctor, monitoring our health. It could detect when we're ill and even - and this bit may stretch your credulity - call an ambulance while you are unconscious.

Swallow a pill containing a microchip and it could photograph your internal organs, reporting back to computers monitoring your health, both inside and outside.

Then again, you could retreat into a virtual world. He shows himself dancing with a partner who is several hundred miles away.

The two images are transmitted by tele-im- NO WAY OUT: Deep Water tells the moving story of Donald Crowhurst and his elaborate hoax in the 1968 round-the-world yacht race BORN TO ACT: Luke Adamson mersion and look as if they are dance partners.

Perhaps the teleport in Star Trek is not so far-fetched after all.

I'm not too sure about robots that think for themselves. We've all seen sci-fi films in which robots run amok and try to take us over. Kaku shows how these machines are being designed to think for themselves - with "object recognition skills" if you want to be technical. Robots can be taught to think faster than humans.

In Japan, he meets Asimo, a robot that walks, talks and generally behaves more like a friend than a machine. Twenty years of research have gone into achieving Asimo's human-like movements which enable him to serve a drink without spilling it.

We also meet Diane, who has been fitted with a brain pacemaker. Chips may be used to help stroke or accident victims. This raises more important questions. "How many of our body parts can we replace without losing our sense of being human?," asks Dr Kaku.

Deep Water brings you back to the real world of complicated human emotions, recounting the tragic story of would-be round the world lone sailor Donald Crowhurst.

Married with four young children and a struggling business, he gambled everything on winning the race back in the late Sixties.

This was pre-satellite and his only communication was through occasional patchedthrough phone calls.

The stress of being alone at sea for six months or more was great. One false report about his position boomeranged until he reached the point of no return. If he continued, it was suicide, and if he returned home, he faced ruin. He found a third alternative - fake his round-the-world trip.

The end of the story ensured that he would be remembered, although not for the reasons he hoped when he embarked on his voyage.