If you go to the GP’s surgery or hospital, you will also be faced with computers hiding here and there. Modern sphygmomanometers (the devices that check blood pressure) have one. The GP probably now has a PC linked to a system that enables him or her to check on your prescription history and choose a drug and print a (readable) prescription. In the hospital a computer will be at the heart of an electrocardiogram (ECG) checking the function of your heart muscles, or an ultrasound scan checking on your unborn child, or that odd bump in your foot. And some diagnostic equipment was impossible without digital computers: CAT (computer-assisted tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) are obvious examples. Indeed, your doctor may now gain his or her earliest experience of surgery through virtual reality, practising on realistic digital images instead of real patients. And, of course, your records may very well be kept on computers, though (oddly) record-keeping is one area in medical computing that seems to lag behind.

At work, even if you don’t work with a computer, one will keep track of your personnel records and produce the payroll. In manufacturing, computer-controlled machine tools and automated production lines have been in use for decades. Robots may do the most repetitive or dangerous work.