There's a thought provoking and downright scary post on WebProNews - The Internet Will Eat You. It's a summary of a 115 page report from the Pew Institute report on the future of technology. The report conjures up a dark future where our privacy is relegated to the trash bin of history, a wave of cyber-addictions takes over our lives as virtual reality becomes more real than virtual, and machines take over. Isn't there a movie about this? At least, we can find some solace that we won't become fast food for a world run by evil robots.

Here are some spooky predictions from the futurists interviewed for the study.

"...it's not the corporation you need to worry about - it's the machines. Though most respondents agreed that humans will remain in control of technology until 2020, beyond that it's a toss up. As machines become more advanced, more self-aware, more independent, they could move beyond human control.

"Fear of enslavement by our creations is an old fear, and a literary tritism," said Paul Saffo, forecaster and director of The Institute for the Future. "But I fear something worse and much more likely - that sometime after 2020 our machines will become intelligent, evolve rapidly, and end up treating us as pets. We can at least take comfort that there is one worse fate - becoming food - that mercifully is highly unlikely."

Whoa pony. Everyone take a deep breath and come back to planet earth. We can't even return a phone call from voice mail when someone asks us to call back using a different phone number from the one they used to place the call. You have call out the number to yourself in a sing-song rhythm or the number is lost until you grind through your voice mail again. The computer power might come on strong in the next decades but we have a long way to go until the software makes robots hungry.