Tech changes life at high speed

One of the movies nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars was Her.

Set in an unspecified time in the future, it's about a deep and loving relationship that develops between Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a recently divorced writer of other people's love letters, and "Samantha", a female voice on his computer who is intuitive, insightful, organising, demonstrative, uncomplaining and funny. While Her is portrayed as science fiction, living machines like "Samantha" are closer to our world than we imagine.

At the recent Bidvest Management Conference in Singapore, David Roberts, from Singularity University, a thinktank in Silicon Valley whose aim is to educate leaders to embrace technology, played a recorded phone conversation between a New York Times journalist and a friendly female trying to sell him a healthcare product. Each time the journalist accused the voice of being a robot, the female replied she was a real person. After a brief pause for breath, she continued to discuss the purpose of her call. Finally, when the journalist advised his caller he was hanging up because she was a robot, she sighed, perceptibly hurt, and wished him well. She was a robot.

Artificial intelligence that will disrupt the way businesses think and act in the future was one of the developments in technology raised in the conference. As Rogers cautioned, the trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we are ready for it.

Cognitive computing is advancing at such a rapid pace that it is only a matter of time before a company's call centre and telesales division retreat into a machine world, operated by sensitive, caring and vibrantly tangible "Samanthas".

Not only will "Samantha" learn to sell us products, but with each passing day she could, with our consent, pick up info from our smartphones or tablets, recording our preferences and habits and, crunching the data, check our health or emotional state or pass on lifestyle suggestions.

Artificial intelligence was one of three major technological developments discussed that could bring about paradigm shifts in business practices. The two others were 3D printing and robotics.

Roger Dennis from Future Agenda, a New Zealand-domiciled consultancy, showed a picture of a ship leaving China, stacked with containers full of small objects bound for the US. Down the line all these items, he explained, could be "printed" in America, cutting down design and production time and eliminating the costs of shipping the imported merchandise.

3D is a process of producing three-dimensional objects of any shape and size from a digital model. Rogers demonstrated the procedure by scanning a nut and bolt and then slowly "printing" the articles, layer by layer on an inexpensive, portable machine.

The persuasive difference is that traditionally a nut and bolt would be cut from steel, removing unwanted material to form the object. The benefit, Rogers said, was that nuts and bolts do not have to be solid to perform effectively. For aircraft production, for instance, hollow fasteners would reduce a plane's weight, improving its fuel efficiency. The benefits of this technology for manufacturers of everything from prosthetics to jewellery are radical. Require a spare part in the international space station? No need to send up a spacecraft - simply "print" it.

Computers will monitor our state of mind, robocars will drive us safely to work and, at factories, robots will supervise production and clean offices without breaks.

I was upset watching a video in which an engineer kicked a dog-like robot, demonstrating the machine's capability to regain its balance before continuing its programmed task.

Roberts counselled that one of the biggest problems we face is that our minds are wired to think linearly while tech develops exponentially, pointing out that the Wright brothers flew about 35m in 1903, yet less than a decade later aircraft were used in warfare. We went on to deliberate Bitcoins, Google glasses, smart drugs, the revival of cities, the protection of vital resources like water and the fight for talent, so much so that I missed a date with Samantha.