In the late 1940s, Vonnegut observed how General Electric was replacing human machinists with computer-operated milling machines to cut rotors for jet engines. This passing of duties from humans to bots led Vonnegut to imagine a world where human chores of all manners would cease being the labour of men and become strictly the work of machines. Power and income, then, would be concentrated among the few who controlled the machines. Snowden and the teams of analysts at the NSA, CIA and GCHQ who sit in front of our stores of electronic intelligence will hardly be necessary in 15 years. Algorithms will have replaced them, leaving only a few humans, like General Keith Alexander of the NSA, left to watch the house.

Underneath those top humans will be machine-learning algorithms that dance across the data of humanity like a spider tending a web. They won’t be programmed simply to search for call patterns or numbers; they will learn what patterns and numbers are significant by ingesting news, conflicts and terrorist threats in real time, comparing that to activity seen on computer and phone networks. Algorithms that trade stocks at the speed of light already read specially tailored news feeds from Bloomberg and Reuters; the intelligence world, although less lucrative than that of Wall Street and the City of London, will not be far behind.

Algorithms are more efficient than people; they can find relationships within data streams that a human eye couldn’t spot in 20 years; they’re indefatigable – and they’re cheap.