Living the dream

Polish writer and futurologist Stanisław Lem in 1961 wrote the novel ‘Return from the Stars’ in which electronic readers had replaced the printed word: “I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I had been looking forward to them, after the micro films that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. It was no longer possible to browse among the shelves, to feel the weight of a volume in hand announcing how much there was to read. Instead the bookstore resembled, an electronic laboratory.” Lem predicted not only today's e-books, but also virtual reality, the creation of Google and the wide usage of robots. Human-like machines are no longer fiction and robotisation is slowly changing our world representing not only an opportunity but a threat with the resulting loss of jobs. A few years ago an unusual hotel was opened in the Japanese city of Sasebo on the island of Kyushu &