Johannesburg — IAN Pearson is the kind of man who will watch the latest Star Wars movie and find it all terribly old-fashioned.

As the chief futurologist at British Telecom (BT), Pearson already believes in computers with more intelligence than humans, and the ability to shake hands or even make love with someone who is not physically present.

Anyone feeling a little inferior to such artificial intelligence will be able to increase their brain power by swallowing some chips - the silicon, not potato, type.

Pearson, who spoke at the Futurex conference in Johannesburg last week via satellite link, is responsible for keeping the profit flowing at BT once the cost of a phone call drops to zero.

Free phone calls sound like science fiction for long-suffering customers in SA, but the day will come, says Pearson.

The technology behind that is ambient intelligence, or microchips a fraction of a millimetre in size that are capable of communicating or processing and storing information. Those will be so cheap they can be embedded into every device, phones included.

When a user wants to make a call, the handset will link to the next nearest device by wireless. That will instantly be repeated many times over, creating an ad hoc network.

"One phone will link to another across the room and all the way across town and onto the internet and across the world, so you can call me without paying for the call. Very soon you will have a network for free via different terminals."

The technology must be self-organising so each chip automatically connects to another, but that is just an advancement of technology already used in digital telephony exchanges. "No telecommunications company needs to exist in 10 years' time as networks can be set up by the devices themselves," says Pearson.

Scary stuff for existing operators, but instead of opposing the development, BT is trying to grasp the technology to create new opportunities.

"The price of a phone call in Europe has been coming down and will come down all the way to zero. We can't run a business on zero so we have to reinvent our company by developing new services that people will pay for because we improve their lifestyle or make their company richer."

The ability to transmit information instantly to anyone poses a risk of information overload. Shoppers could find their handsets bombarded with adverts as they walk through a mall. But that creates a brilliant opportunity to invent what Pearson dubs "a digital bubble force field".

He isn't joking. BT is working on a technology to profile incoming data and weed out what the recipient does not want. "We can make a lot of money from that."

Tiny computer chips will become so cheap they can be embedded in any device. To give them "intelligence", scientists are seeking inspiration from nature.

Ants are not the brightest insects individually, but collectively they can conduct very sophisticated tasks by using simple algorithms that can be reproduced in IT systems.

The most exciting developments in the next 15 years will come from the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, IT and cognitive sciences.

"Eventually we will have chips that can connect to your nervous system and improve your memory and your IQ," says Pearson. "It sounds like science fiction but the European Union is spending à3bn on nanotechnology, and between $10bn and $15bn of research and development is going into this around the world."

Right now the average human is thousands of times smarter than a computer, but as processing power increases we will be outsmarted by 2015, Pearson believes. "We are talking about making a machine with the intelligence of Europe or Africa by 2020, and synthetic personality technologies will be mature by 2025."

The concept of work will change once human brains are less efficient and more prone to errors and tea breaks than computers. When tasks such as strategising and writing can be done by artificial intelligence, those skills will no longer be valued, and the value of humans' care skills will increase, Pearson believes.

Massive computing power will help us concoct cures for diseases and crack space inhabitation.

But it all comes with a caveat: "We have to be very careful, because if we get it wrong we'll end up with the Terminator."