FOR the past two weeks, in the fusty surroundings of the New York Athletic Club, Garry Kasparov has been playing chess against a computer called Deep Junior in a contest billed as “Man v Machine”.

It is a scene reminiscent of an H.G. Wells novel, although Wells would have changed the venue from Central Park South to Pall Mall and had his young hero confront his opponent in the gilt-pillared atrium of the Reform Club.

The Kasparov match, which ended last night in a tie, was played under the auspices of the World Chess Federation, which suggests that it is only a short step before artificial intelligences will be allowed to compete in the human championship. Deep Junior has already seen off all man-made rivals. Kasparov readily concedes: “Humans’ days at the top of the chess world are limited. I give us just a few years.”

Had Wells dreamt up the scene he would have had the mechanical calculator appear in human form, dressed in a smoking jacket and Turkish tasseled beret, every now and then checking the time from a fob watch in his waistcoat.

The 2003 reality is more mundane. Kasparov sits on one side of the board with the computer’s assistant on the other. When the Grand Master moves, the computer’s gofer taps the coordinates into a laptop and the computer responds.

In most imagined accounts of the day that machines inherit the Earth, the computer is, like Frankenstein’s monster, based closely upon the human model. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis the beautiful metallic android in female form is zapped into life as a fleshy flapper.

The filmic computer invaders have remained mostly humanoid ever since. In Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s evocation of Philip K. Dick’s novel, whose advertising tag was, “Man Has Made His Match — Now It’s His Problem”, Deckard is left with Rachael, a droid so perfectly feminine and submissive that when she pleads for her life he shrugs and takes her as his lover.

In Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Brian Aldiss’s Artificial Intelligence, the android boy David is so well crafted he comes to the conclusion that he must be real. Even when robots are not entirely human, like R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars, they are made to act like warm-blooded, usually humorous mammals.

Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the future was altogether truer. His all-embracing computer HAL was kept out of sight and had no human characteristics, other than a soft voice and an unblinking, all-seeing, red-lit lens. It is that impersonal robot-in-a-box that is slowly taking over Western life.

Our children have been playing with artificial intelligence, rather than real flesh and blood playmates, for the past decade, but we have barely noticed. We tend to think that they are playing on the computer, when they are playing with or against it. We think that too much screen time must be bad for them because that is all we can imagine. The 20th century story is one of gradual addiction to the cinema, then the television, then the computer screen.

Who exactly was Kasparov playing against at the New York Sports Club? And who are our teenage sons really confronting when they tap away at the keyboard playing EA Sports’s Fifa 2003? Our children are playing with their computer friends. The prospect does not alarm us because they do not look like us.

The virtual world is replacing real life for many children and young adults. The chess set, the Monopoly board, even the muddy football field are now tidied away behind a screen. The Sims, one of the best-selling computer games of all time, is a live-action virtual dolls’ house. Sony’s robot dog AIBO not only responds to commands but can even answer back with a human voice.

America is on the brink of a new technological revolution which will do away with human labour in many fields where a safe pair of hands has always been thought essential. The section of the aviation industry currently enjoying the patronage of the Pentagon is the niche which makes unmanned aerial vehicles, or pilotless drones.

These remote-controlled aircraft, which have been flying over Afghanistan and Yemen, are about to take off in large numbers in American commercial airspace. Talks are going on to allow routine unmanned flights.

There have already been successful test flights of pilotless aircraft across the Atlantic and the Pacific, and there are ambitious plans for unmanned cargo craft regularly to fly these routes. It is a strange human vanity to imagine that error-prone human beings are best suited to flying aircraft. Pilots may tell you different, but apart from wearing smart uniforms and tickling air hostesses under the chin, their main function is to sit idly by while the on-board automatic pilot does the donkey work. Now the American aviation industry is planning to replace them with teams of pilots flying aircraft remotely from centralised command centres.

As Tom Wolfe revealed in The Right Stuff, astronauts have always been redundant. After they insisted that they must be seen to be doing something to make their craft fly, they were given a succession of small, unimportant tasks and futile knobs to twiddle.

All this puts the Columbia tragedy last weekend into pitiful perspective. The main function of astronauts has not been scientific — automated experiments are more efficient and are not marred by human error — but as instruments of public relations, to keep American taxpayers involved in the expensive business of space exploration, and to make often absurd political points, such as launching the first woman, or Hispanic, or Israeli into space.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about the shuttle crash is that instead of curtailing the reckless despatch of people into orbit, it has so roused American pride that efforts to put human beings into space will be redoubled.

This romantic bravado is nothing new. As John F. Kennedy said: “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it.”

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