Have you ever wondered what the real motive is behind supermarket loyalty cards? They are a front for tying you up with the things that you buy.
Till records are no longer lists of anonymous purchases, but preferences attached to real, reachable people.
One day you will turn on your Internet terminal, log on to your customary grocery supplier and will be greeted with a personalised message such as: "Special offer on Chateauneuf-du-Pape." The system will have noted your love of red wine at around £8.50 a bottle and will try to nudge your spending up a notch.
When you have negotiated this temptation, you will check your regular, default list and make some amendments as Auntie, who is staying for the weekend, likes that revolting tinned salmon and, as the cat has just been run over, you cancel its food. Otherwise, it's the order as usual.
This model, of a supply being tempered by our own behaviour, is already part of some e-mail systems. If you regularly answer e-mail from Jack before anybody else, the system can put Jack at the top of your list every morning. But if a deal falls through with Jack, he will slip down the running order.
Soon the same kind of system will help to regulate our viewing behaviour. In a world of multichannel, pay-per-view, unscheduled television, every minute you play about with your remote control is a minute of unsold entertainment.
So entertainment sellers will log what we watch and when; football on Monday, cartoons with the kids on Tuesday; pornography when the wife's out at her needlework class on Wednesday; documentaries when the husband is out at darts on Thursday, and so on.
You will be reminded of the special two-hour episode of your soap opera to be released at midnight at a special price.
These examples of intelligent agents are the simple part of information delivery based on "data mining" and behavioural analysis. We have much more to look forward to when probability software based on the theories of Thomas Bayes, an 18th century clergyman, will analyse huge quantities of data to produce manageable search reports.
Type in "Lions" without the prefix "British" and the system will guess that, as you watch a great deal of rugby but never wildlife programmes, you probably want the latest news of the tour.
These developments will save us all a lot of bother. But the usual reaction is that we don't need all this help.
So many of us are speeding into the future with our back to the engine, analysing where we are going in terms of where we have been, that we are not ready for broadband technology and what it will do.
Soon your Internet terminal will be an interactive, digital television, a telephone and a search engine but it will undergo a massive qualitative and quantitative shift once freed from conventional telephones.
This is when we will need default grocery lists, narrow-casting and supersmart searching software.
Conventional supermarkets are limited in what they stock by their space and your trolley pushing patience. But their online services will be virtually unlimited.
We will soon forget the constraints of terrestrial television, no longer united by watching the same things at the same time. But no average human being will be able to navigate all the world's available digital entertainment.
Even with the conventional tools for building boring websites, the amount of data on the Web is doubling annually.
Soon we will be out of the messy experimentation and the gentle academic Internet of the 1980s and 1990s and into serious business and commerce.
Instead of the annoyance of the "illegal operation", we will not be allowed to fail. The combination of ruthless retail, intelligent systems and unlimited capacity has the potential to overwhelm us.
On the other hand, we will be able to buy intelligent systems that work for us against the salesmen.
The crunch will come when the dot.coms can survive only on the sale of advertising. What will happen when our privately purchased software automatically cleans out the stuff we don't want, even while we sleep?
