A recent lecture at London’s Royal Institution by Ben Hammersley has contributed to the debate about the digital world, communications and politics. That is what should happen in Faraday’s spiritual home – without the electric motor where would the digital present be?

Hammersley challenged a number of our preconceptions about the impact of technology, as well as opening eyes to what is already here. What might be thought of as science fiction isn’t. The future is too uncertain to predict (does anyone need convincing of that after the last few weeks in North Africa) but some interesting broad themes about the nature of artificial intelligence and some impacts on society emerged.

Moore’s Law says that computing power will double every 18 months; that means between elections what was eight will be 32 – at the same price. It is this type of advance that gives the US the in-development X 47 B aircraft – pilotless and capable of taking off and landing by itself.

If you want surveillance why not use the artificial hummingbird with built in camera, or the swarm of cheap drones that do two things – follow each other and film the ground. Haven’t seen it yet? You will at the 2012 Olympics.

Will Artificial Intelligence overtake humankind’s capabilities? Perhaps it already has with chess playing Deep Blue. And perhaps it hasn’t as can be seen from this article about another game playing supercomputer. And will robots be like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Probably not, because the big advances are cheap computers doing small things but en masse or in swarms. They don’t talk and they don’t look vaguely human.

Swarms are big in Hammersley’s future. For example, while Twitter didn’t bring about the revolution in Tunisia or Egypt (see Christian May’s blog on the point here and an interesting blog from BBC’s Paul Mason on related themes) new swarm behaviour played a part. An internet ‘entity’ – there is no easy way of describing it – called Anonymous banded together to send information to those countries when the internet and mobile phone systems were blocked. Ingeniously they activated old tech fax machines by computer to send information to the revolutionaries.

Artificial Intelligence also imposes itself on finance in unexpected ways. This is not just the hole in the wall cash dispenser or internet banking. While there has been electronic trading generated by computers for some time – each exploiting micro differences in prices in nanoseconds – it was interesting to hear that Wall Street firms have begun to move offices ever closer to stock exchanges.  Why? Because if you were two hundreds yards closer than your rivals, your machine could react quicker.

A company called Hyde Park Global is one of the principal players in this game. Some companies have developed genetic algorithms for trading. Another twist is analysing news flow to add to the mix of trading information. This has led to the bizarre situation of computers trading against each other and basing decisions on information relayed about erratic trading caused by their own trades.  Exchange regulators are grappling with all this. If you are looking for a silver lining, at least computers don’t demand huge bonuses.

If this is the environment, what is the impact on politics and communications? Hammersley, who must cut a flamboyant figure in the Foreign Office when he does seminars there, points out the effect on notions of country.

Ideas of nationhood become tilted when you think that you can have a closer relationship by computer with someone in Canada than you do two doors down in Acacia Avenue.

For those in the communication business, the speed of digital change presents immense challenges and makes the work of explaining the work of clients – corporate or private – even more complex. David Cameron can be put on the spot by an inadvertent remark by Nick Clegg in moments. Newspaper websites can begin to look like rolling TV news programmes. The way we view news has changed and we don’t know what to make of it. Context is everything.

Take, for example, Cameron’s latest overseas visit. It doesn’t matter that he is able to view news via digital media from wherever, within 6 hours of leaving the UK your ‘feel’ for the country, its people and its mood decays, and decays rapidly. (You can read about one aspect of the response in Tim Montgomerie’s piece on the changes underway in No. 10).

In John Major’s Downing Street the technology was simply not available and officials had to rely for news on cuttings faxed each night to keep vaguely in touch. The only problem was that cuttings have no context. Having seen too many prime ministerial funks at disobliging cuttings I instituted a system where faxed copies of the front and main pages were also sent. You couldn’t read them but at least you could say that the story that annoyed was buried on page five of The Mirror and who cared? Of course, there was a problem when the irritant story appeared on the front of the Telegraph. Sometimes faxes were ‘lost’.

Now we have computer and iPad editions of papers and there is an interesting issue arising. Where is the context and how important are stories?

The rule of thumb about nearness to the front has changed because everything is just a click away. More than that, with news feeds like RSS you can just get the stories that you’re interested in sent to you. The information received subliminally with newspapers as you flick through, just isn’t there in the same way.

The wired generation does not ‘get’ news in anything like the same way as those of us from a different century.

There is a challenge to make sure that important information is widely accessible and the current and next generation don’t find themselves experts on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook without the faintest idea of which party is in charge.

The challenge is to adapt to these new mechanisms and find ways of adding depth to speed, so 140 characters on Twitter provokes a wish to go to a link to find more.

Churchill, looking back, once said “in those days we had a real political democracy led by a hierarchy of statesmen and not a fluid mass distracted by newspapers”. One can argue about the concept of ‘hierarchy of statesmen’ but surely now the ‘fluid mass’ is being distracted by digital media. Its power for good is unarguable but equally there are times when we can seem to drown in information overload.

Hammersley concluded his lecture by saying that there was no safe prediction about the future other than that the next decade ‘would be weird’.

He’s probably right but at least we will be able watch the repeat on iPlayer at a time of our own choosing.