I have the most horrible feeling that the only possible conclusion to the problem of Muslim extremism — and I’m looking 30 or more years down the line here — is mass deportation and an all-new cold war between Mecca and Rome.

I am also fearful that unless we stop thinking of ways to prevent global warming, and start to address the problems it will cause when it gets here, our children are going to finish their days in an overcrowded, superheated vision of hell. Where they can’t even get a cold drink, because all the corner shopkeepers have been made to go and live in Pakistan.

Unless, of course, America goes bust in the meantime . . . which it will. It is a mathematical certainty, unless George W Bush announces, today, a tax hike for both individuals and companies of 69% or he cuts federal spending to zero. Not just for a month or two. But for ever.

Since George Bush is unlikely to do either, the world’s biggest economy will collapse, which means we can’t rely on Uncle Sam when your neighbourhood mullah beats your daughter with a stick for not going to school in a tablecloth. Because it’s 47C out there and getting hotter, and Jonathon Porritt won’t let you have air-conditioning.

Strangely, however, my biggest fear for the future of the planet and the wellbeing of our children is YouTube.

At present it is full, mostly, of young men falling off their bicycles and catching fire. But in addition to this you can log on if you wish to see next week’s episode of 24.

This means the producers of 24 have gone to all the trouble of making a show, and paying the actors, and getting all those phones to go “beep beep eeoooh” and then finding that no television company in the world is all that bothered about screening it, because everyone’s seen it already on the web.

Naturally the company that makes 24 — and I suppose I should point out that it’s Fox, which is part of News Corporation, the parent company of this newspaper — has started proceedings against YouTube.

Fine, you might think. YouTube will be forced to treat the copyright laws with a bit more respect and that will be that. Except it won’t. Because the internet’s like mercury, so as soon as it becomes impossible to post copyrighted material on YouTube, some other computer nerd in Bangladesh will, for an outlay of 35p, start a new video-sharing site. And you’ll be able to post it there.

This morning there are 921 Jeremy Clarkson clips on YouTube, for which, obviously, I receive not a penny. Of course I could sue them — and now they’re owned by Google I think I might — but then the 921 clips would simply appear on the new sharing site based in Bangladesh. And what’s the point of suing someone whose only assets are a laptop and a loincloth? The upshot is that films, television shows, magazines, newspapers, songs, anything published or recorded, can be put on the internet. And the person who published it or recorded it doesn’t get any money. So what’s the point of publishing or recording anything? Obviously, if Jonathon Porritt were to write a book, it would be jolly funny to buy the first copy and put it all online, so he ended up with a royalty cheque for 50p. But it’s not so funny if you are Jonathon Porritt.

At present, everyone is obsessed with the internet. Every large media company in the world is investing millions in their websites and not one, so far as I can tell, has even the remotest idea of how it can possibly generate any money.

A prime example is iTunes. It doesn’t. Apparently Apple doesn’t make a penny from the music you download to your computer. But if you want to put that onto a portable device you have to buy an iPod, and they make lots of dosh from that.

It’s a brilliant wheeze, but now the Norwegian ombudsman has decided that Apple must make its loss-making music library available to anyone, no matter what sort of hardware they have. France and Germany are thinking of following suit. And if the rest of the world falls into line, that’s pretty much that for Apple.

It’s all a nonsense anyway, because there are countless sites out there in cyberspace where you can download music for nothing and then put it onto whatever sort of MP3 player takes your fancy.

Small wonder that last week Music Zone, a chain of Manchester-based record shops, went belly up. Who would buy a CD these days when with two or three clicks they can have it for nothing? That’s as idiotic as saving up for a BMW motorcycle when you live in Branscombe.

And it’s not just the media that are under threat. Why go to a doctor when there’s NHS Direct? Why have sex when there’s always some bird in Latvia who’s happy to get her knickers off? Why buy an encyclopedia when there’s Wikipedia (apart from the fact that everything on Wikipedia is wrong)? Why go to Tesco when you can shop online? Estate agents. Property developers. Motorcycle dispatch riders. They’ve all had it.

The only people I can think of who won’t lose their jobs to the internet are those who empty cesspits. And nobody seems to have spotted this.

One day, of course, they will. The world will wake up and realise it’s unemployed; that we’ve all been terminated by machines. And please don’t try to argue that men will always triumph over machinery because we can always turn it off. Because that’s the thing with the internet. You can’t.

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