By 2030 we'll all be wearing permanent headsets controlled by artificial intelligence telling us what to do, according to a UK "future expert". David Wood, chair of the London Futurists, worked in the technology industry for 25 years and was predicting the ubiquity of smartphones as early the 1990s. "We'll see people carrying more in their ears, and not just as fashion accessories," he told Daily Star Online. "Headsets are going to get more popular and more powerful." These devices, which could look like visors, glasses or even Apple AirPods, will combine artificial intelligence with augmented reality, providing an all-in-one service to be worn around the clock, Wood says.

In Part 1 of this 3-part miniseries, we discussed the origins of artificial intelligence (AI), and we considered some low-hanging AI-enabled fruit in the form of speech recognition, voice control, and machine vision. In Part 2, we noted some of the positive applications of AI, like recognizing skin cancer, identifying the source of outbreaks of food poisoning, and the early detection of potential pandemics. In fact, there are so many feel-good possibilities for the future that they can make your head spin. In a moment, we'll ponder a few more of these before turning our attention to the dark side. Another topic we considered in Part 2 was the combination of mediated reality (MR) and AI, where mediated reality encompasses both augmented reality (AR) and deletive reality (DR). In the case of AR, information is added to the reality we are experiencing.