Apparently, AI doctors have been around for almost two years. And this year, we can expect chat shows hosted by robots, Barbies that demand an allowance and the first synthetic life form.

Or so British Telecommunication's tech unit, BTexact thinks.

The timeline has been around for a while now, (actually its first incarnation was in 1991) and was designed to help understand how the future could possibly look.

According to the report, an all-woman space crew and toy-targeting viruses should have appeared already, and we're supposed to see the start of networked appliances and giant Star Trek-esque holodecks that will work like a big hamster wheel.

And it gets better. Next year we're going to see AI priests in confession booths and Barbie shopping assistants for our kids.

On the horizon, we have fractal-shape changing robots and a global electronic currency (2005), police using 'phasers' (2010), robot insects for crop pollination (2012) and the first manned mission to Mars (2015).

And then, nanotechnology hits (2020) and we get new 'smart skin', crazy weapons and weird hybrid people-bots.

But it's not all fun. We have a global machine dictator on the rise (2020), a collapse of the sperm count (2020) and zealous environmentalists destroying the environment (2040). Even more bizarre, political correctness is likely to cause another new dark age (2050).

I'm not sure whether this is saying something about the future, or the political leanings of British Telecom, but it's comforting to know that we can still head back to a time when the world was good (I'm thinking around 1974) 'cause we're supposed to develop time travel in 2075. If you're not going to be around before then, just go into hibernation, which we'll see around 2030.

Check out the full list here, print it out and then invite some friends around for some chin-stroking.

The PC Authority crew lost a day's work on the sperm count one.