Ever wondered what would happen if the PC on your desk was cleverer than you? At the moment, PCs may be powerful but they certainly aren't clever. Performing millions of operations in a matter of seconds is all very impressive, but computers can't hold a conversation with their users, can't understand television game-shows and can't even tell the difference between beer and water. With the exception of some students, most humans can do all those things with their eyes closed. Highlighting the difference between humans and computers, the following (unattributed) message was generated by a DOS-based fortune cookie program.

I really hate this damned machine,
I wish that I could sell it.
It never does quite what I want,
But only what I tell it.

All too true, but this is unlikely to be the case for ever. Compared to 20 years ago, today's computers are monstrously powerful machines, many thousands of times faster than their predecessors. Raw power isn't everything, of course, but when you combine raw power with recent developments in artificial intelligence, machines with apparent minds of their own become possible or even probable at some point in the future.

Imagine what will happen if (when?) intelligence really hits the desktop. Instead of choosing a PC on the basis of its technical specification, you'll choose one for its IQ or personality. At the top end of the range there'll be happy, clever PCs that greet their users with a cheerful "Good morning, how are you today?". In the budget sector, meanwhile, you'll have a choice of grumpy, rather stupid PCs that do nothing until they're kicked very hard. It's an area that Douglas Adams, among other authors, has explored, and it all sounds like a ridiculous idea. And so, history tells us, it'll probably happen.

But what follows the emergence of intelligence? In the case of human history, the answer is war, prostitution and the free market economy, in no particular order. Apart from the idea of battle computers throwing nuclear missiles at each other, which is a bit 'eighties', the other two seem a little unlikely for computers ("Psst! How much for a RAM probe, darlin'?"). But another major influence is religion, possibly tied in with a moral code. Will an intelligent, self-aware computer start to question the purpose of its own existence? Or yours? Will it decide what you can and cannot do when using it? There'll be no need for laws against Internet porn; just wait for a PC religion to spring up and all you'll see on screen is "Cannot download JEZEBEL.JPG. Danger of user corruption." or perhaps "Moral fabric damaged. Abort, repair, fail?".

So the next time your PC displays an unintelligible error message consisting of a blue screen with a few hexadecimal numbers on it, be happy. Sometime in the next century, we may look back nostalgically at these relatively youthful days of the computer industry, as we pit our feeble organic minds against the mighty bureaucratic intelligence of the devices we've created.