It's been quite a while since the last editorial column appeared on these pages, but I've got a note from my mum, so that's OK. My excuse? Over the last couple of months we've been working on a complete redesign of the site, which will make it more interactive and (hopefully) more useful to our readers. The new design will be going live in April, so watch this space, as they say.

But on with the waffle. As is customary for these columns, I had hoped this one would be another monologue on a topic that's almost, but not quite, completely unrelated to computers. Unfortunately I've been thwarted, and this month's blurb is actually fairly relevant to computer users.

The title of this column says it all, really. There have been several news items recently that indicate that we are coming to a time when computers will become even more fundamental to our lives than they are already. One was an article in New Scientist magazine, which explained how computer-controlled robots and interpretation algorithms were being used to carry out experimental scientific research. At their most simple, these systems do nothing more than repeat tedious research tasks, relying on fairly basic feedback loops to guide them in a direction that might result in a successful new discovery.

But the more complex of these algorithms are able to sift through vast repositories of scientific information, cleverly comparing papers about one topic with others that may, at first, seem totally unrelated. This task, which would be nearly impossible for a human to carry out by hand, has already resulted in several new scientific avenues opening up for exploration. And some of the papers published on the back of these findings even feature the computers' 'names' as part of the credits.

On a related topic, the 'game of life' - which has been around in various forms almost since the dawn of the IT age - is finding its way into industrial processes and patent-dodging. The idea is quite simple; two computer-generated 'organisms' are bred together, producing (for example), a dozen offspring. Because of random mutations, all these offspring are slightly different. Selecting any two of them and breeding them together will result in a further dozen mutant offspring, each with some features of their 'parents'. And so it goes on. At school we dabbled with such a program briefly before going back to Elite, Defender and Meteors. So much for the joys of knowledge.

Now similar programs are being used to work around patents and even design new products. A program is fed with some basic information about what it should produce, then it generates a series of mutant offspring. The ones that best fit the intended result are then bred together, and so on until the perfect result pops out.

This kind of targeted processing is a technology that's very much in its infancy, but within a few years it's likely that it will have a fundamental impact in our lives.

Think about it. New products will appear that are so cunningly designed to appeal to us that we'll be helpless to avoid buying them, so we'll all become bankrupt. Computer games will become hideously addictive, tapping into the same emotional responses as hard drugs. Lawyers will use portable versions of the software to prove categorically that wrong is right, up is down and no, he really did not have sex with that woman. Soon, democracy will crumble into idiocracy, where super-intelligent computers let us think that we're in control, while in fact they manipulate us like puppets as we drool over the latest toy.

But more importantly, I'd be able plug a few 'desired results' into the program, then sit back and relax while it writes my editorial column for me. Ah, technology really is beautiful.