Advanced automation/People in control
These systems needs to be carefully controlled by people. We will always need to understand how they work, at every level, and they will need to be monitored. Some people wonder whether we will get to a stage where the machines are so sophisticated, and we have relied on them for so long, that no-one will actually know how they work, and therefore we will not be fully in control of them. The reality is that there will always be people interested in this sort of thing - engineers, scientists and geeks in general. They want to know how to make things and understand how they work. There always have been geeks, and luckily there always will be.
People will need to improve the designs and make sure they are safe and efficient. We must make sure that we always remain part of the loop. It is highly likely that we will develop computer-controlled systems more capable at certain tasks than we are, in fact we already have done, but this trend will inevitably continue until there is very little in terms of system control that can't be done better by a machine system. However they will still ultimately be tools for people to work with and do a job for us.
