Since the 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically connected, global village, thanks to the net. So why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village. Barbrook, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Westminster, has been researching this topic for more than four years. What he wants is to show how ideology is used to warp time.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence holds the promise of smart devices and systems that will enrich our lives, but according to one ICT executive, this promise of a digital utopia is a misguided one. "We are collecting a lot more data, processing a lot more data, and inventing what many are calling smart devices. But they're not artificially intelligent, and there is a danger we're making claims for artificial intelligence giving us a utopia that we're not going to get," said Mike Hinchey, president of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). "We don't really know what intelligence is, and we're making claims that these intelligent technologies are going to do things." However, Hinchey told IoT Hub that there are companies making genuine progress in AI, and that their efforts shouldn't be discounted.

It took millennia for Humanity to advance from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution. The pace of Human development continues to rapidly accelerate. The next Revolution is already overtaking society before many are ready for- or even aware of it. Both diametrically opposed predictions curiously are based on the premise that Humans will blithely give up control to either benevolent or diabolical machine'overlords'. There are arguments for both extremes, and both sides raise enough valid questions provoke meaningful dialogue on AI ethics and control. While History reminds us that extreme people and ideas often provide valid counterweight to over-enthusiasm and even zealotry from opposing people and views, they usually tend to be mere lane markers for History's true road.