I'm assuming strawberry

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You've got a "smart yoghurt" by about 2025, and we did the calculations, and we reckon that it's possible to make a yoghurt with roughly the same processing power as the entire European population.

And he's entirely serious. I particularly like how he says 'a yoghurt', as though he's thinking of a little pot of St Ivel Shape, with an info box showing calories, carbs, protein and IQ.

Other than being worryingly full of low-fat sci-fi and low-rent analogies, Ian Pearson's view of what will happen next, formed as part of his work as a futurologist for BT, hits on one interesting note: what happens if the power of PlayStation is used not for finding a cure for cancer, but for finding the password to your bank account?

It is getting to the point now where the next generation of games consoles have one percent of the processing power that your head's got. If you connect those together, and they are designed to be connected together from the ground up, then you have the capability to link millions of consoles together, and since people don't care about security very much on those sorts of platforms, they are absolutely ideal networks to be made into zombie machines. If that happens, you can leverage all that computing power to try and decrypt messages to try and hack into bank accounts, and use all of that power to launch enormously powerful denial of service attacks, which can't happen today because they don't have enough computing power.

When the Xbox launched, the air was full of dire prognostications about how wrong it would all go when your drive needed defragmentation, yet I've seen very little about what might go wrong when you plug your Wii or PS3 into the unrestricted internet. I'm not the right kind of geek to know how resilient the PS3's Linux-based OS will be to viruses, or how much proprietory protection Nintendo's systems give the Wii, but you don't need the brains of a yoghurt to see that both must be big, fat tempting targets for those who amuse themselves by spoiling other people's fun.