Superficially, the world will probably look quite similar to how it does now, in fifty or even a hundred years' time.
London will still be that mass of brick-built Victorian houses it has always been, with their little back gardens and their grey slate roofs, which you see as you take the train into town.
The buses will probably still be red, and the trains will will probably look the same as they always have – at least in Britain's capital.
In the book I speculate that the London underground will look practically identical to how it does now – although the trains might not have any drivers.
Cars will still be about, although they will probably be self-driving. They will probably be electrically powered, and in a hundred years' time there might even be enough charging points for them.
Mass transit systems will continue more or less as they are now, with not enough seats, and the pull and tug of gravity around bends will be just the same as it is has always been.
Moreover, there will probably be a cafe culture, and if we're lucky thriving high streets as well. Hairdressers, beauty salons and tanning studios will still be about, along with convenience stores, antique shops and clothes stores – in fact any business where the touch and feel of the item is important.
Of course it is possible that at some time in the future the odd bi-pedal robot may walk by, politely and diffidently making way for you, as it does the job your human postman used to do.
But in the main, Britain (and probably most) countries will look remarkably similar to how they do now. The air will be somewhat cleaner (no more internal combustion engines) and people might have a lot more leisure time, but on the surface things will look pretty similar.
But underneath the surface, things will look pretty different. The extent and reach of a handful of tech companies will be all-pervasive. Their knowledge of us – from our use of their smart devices – will be all-encompassing.
In the future tech companies will be able to actually understand the content of our phone calls. They will know – thanks to our smart devices – what time we get up and go to bed. They will screen our texts and be able to collate all this data. It is possible n the future a complete digital mapping of our lives may be possible.
Absolutely everything will be known about us. What are opinions are, who are friends are, so much so that in the future tech providers will in theory be able to map who knows who across the entire country.
Moreover face recognition will become omnipotent. While it might catch a lot of criminals, it will also yield an awful lot of other data which can be cross-referenced with information from other sources. Truly, whoever is in charge of this will be all-powerful.
But who will be in charge of it? In my book I speculate there will be only one tech provider – Avocado – who will treat this data carefully. They will not even share it with the government – except in clearly defined circumstances.
But will that be the case? That a tech company will nobly and for honourable reasons not sell its data to the highest bidder? Or to the government, which would dearly love to have it?
In democracies it is possible that a new dispensation may emerge, a new settlement or understanding between the tech providers and the government, protecting at least some of the rights and privacy of the individual citizen. Clearly however there are other states where this is unlikely to happen, and the state – via the tech companies – will have all the information and be all-powerful. This is a frightening possibility, but it seems real enough seeing how some nations treat their citizens.
Meanwhile the tech companies will widen and deepen their hold on societies in other ways. Many professions like architecture might be hollowed out by artificial intelligence, which can design a building in any style, and also calculate the material required to build it, far more quickly and cheaply than any human being.
Even the supervision of a building project might be carried out by smart software, massively reducing the need for quantity surveyors and administrators at all levels.
Indeed, it is hard to over-estimate the depth and extent to which artificial intelligence and smart software will change our society. Payment systems linked to our faces or smartphones will be seamless. Tax payments will be taken automatically. Funds will flow into and out of our accounts without us having to do a thing.
All this will occur while on the surface little has changed. Out cars may look a little more streamlined and get a little larger or smaller. But the football commentary will still come out of our smartphones on grey wintery days in mid- November, the way it once came out of our radios; and the King will still ride from Buckingham Palace to the state opening of Parliament in a golden carriage; but underneath immense changes will have occurred.
We must hope that the tech companies are kind to us, or at least not too unkind, which they probably will be, at least in the Western democracies.
We must hope there are some basic safeguards on who has got all that data, and what is done with it. We must remember that with great change comes great risk, and new technologies pose new problems of a kind we have never had to solve before.
Currently, governments don't have a very good record against the tech companies. The tech sector has more or less prevented any serious legislation or structural reform. We must hope in the future governments get better at dealing with the tech companies, and reach a new settlement between big tech and the individual.