Perhaps no industry is so closely bound with the ways people think about the future than the information and communication technologies sector - but how do the companies themselves figure out what tomorrow will bring?

The answer might surprise: along with engineers and developers, they employ a range of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and futurologists to help plan today's products and services, but also to figure out what the world - and the marketplace - will look like 10, 20, even 50 years from now.

Many, if not most, of the really big names in networking and computing keep at least one futurologist on the payroll, or else pay for advice from futurist think-tanks. And many also employ people whose jobs most people associate with analysing native cultures.

Intel anthropologist Dr Genevieve Bell laughs when asked to describe what anthropology has to do with chip development, and more precisely, what she actually does once she clocks in at the office.

"We're about helping Intel be strategic," says the Australian, whose mother was an anthropologist who brought Bell and her brother along on her field work.

"Yes, Intel makes semiconductors, but semiconductors don't exist by themselves. If you're designing them, you need to know what they are going to go into and how they need to work."

In other words, she says, you can't do what the technology industry has tended to do - design products and services while thinking only about what you, a tech-savvy industry employee, might want to do with them.

The fact that Intel has a staff anthropologist is in part "a recognition that the market is not just like you." So Dr Bell - who notes: "This is not my mother's anthropology, but has many of the same hallmarks" - spends time out in the field, observing "what makes people tick - what motivates them, makes them happy or pisses them off."

For example, she spent two years visiting seven Australasian countries, in six to eight-week total immersion cycles, where she would spend the day with people, finding out how they live their lives, how they socialise with friends and family, what tools they use around the house, what their children do.

Such assignments help her to understand how other cultures and markets think, work and play. Some of the cultural differences show up how easily large multinationals can fail to understand market needs.

For example, routers for wireless networks are designed primarily for American needs and, therefore, for large American houses - which are twice the size of the average European home, and three times the size of an Asian home.

Consequently, the signal tends to broadcast well outside of the walls of foreign homes, increasing security risks.

She is also fascinated at how technology gets used in unexpected ways. She cites a Middle Eastern company that sells a 3G handset that helps Muslims maintain their religious practice when abroad. The phone uses geographic positioning to determine the direction of Mecca from anywhere in the world, so the user knows which way to face when praying; it uses polyphonic ringtone capability to play a call to prayer, and has calendar features to signal across any time zone when it is time to pray.

"People use technology to support specific cultural and social practices," she says, going directly against accusations that technology creates ruptures in cultures and society.

She is particularly fascinated by the way in which nobody will talk about religion and technology: "Religion is one of the big shaping narratives, but we don't talk about it. We can talk about pornography and the internet but not about religion and the net."

Yet in a world moving towards ubiquitous computing and networks - an "always on, always connected" place, religious observance emphasises quiet introspection and disconnection.

How will that affect the marketplaces of tomorrow, if people don't want to turn on and tune in around the clock? The question is a particular fascination at the moment - and for her, underlines exactly why an anthropologist is valuable to a semiconductor company.

Meanwhile, over at BT's research laboratory Adastral Park, a former British second World War airforce base near Ipswich, employees have forward-looking job titles such as "research foresight manager" and "futurologist" and work to imagine not just next year's market but what BT might be doing in 20 or 40 years.

The 100-acre campus, an odd mix of old military buildings and trendy glass structures, is home to 3,500 scientists and engineers. Some 2 per cent of total BT turnover goes back into R&D at the facility. Mr Robin Mannings, BT's research foresight manager, sits in a lab full of cutting edge internet applications - many designed around having a bit of fun.

His researchers play around with questions such as "is there something after the internet, and if there is, what is it," he says.

In another building, visitors can see a model hospital of the future, in which patient records, medication management, and daily operations are highly networked and make use of radio frequency identity tags. On display in another room are prototype devices and online services - some which may never be producted, but serve to stretch the imagination.

But it is BT futurologist Dr Ian Pearson who gleefully stretches it to what some might term the breaking point. He is fascinated by the ongoing "NBIC" convergence - the meeting up between nanotechnology, biotechnology, infotechnology, and cognitive science (artificial intelligence).

"The long-term goal is to make us super-human beings," he says. But first, there is the little problem of the complexity and unreliability of IT systems - which he feels will begin to be resolved by 2010.

By 2020, we will be experiencing vivid virtual worlds indistinguishable from the real world, a kind of Star Trek holodeck of total sensory immersion. Moves in that direction today include thinner, flexible computer screens, which bring the possibility of using stick-on video-screen 'tattoos' on our skin that have embedded microchips.

Before long the screen will be gone and a tiny nanocomputer could be embedded several layers down in the skin, networked to the human nervous system.

Combine that with contact lenses that provide a view of a screen, and the ability of one's own nanocomputer to link swiftly to increasingly smaller, high capacity storage out on a vast wireless network, and "you have lightening fast access, wherever you want to use it."

That might be in a nightclub, where an "ego badge" with your personal information can beam your details to any interested person, enabling you to open a conversation knowing key details about the other person's life.

But wait. Perhaps the person, while mildly attractive, doesn't suit your tastes? Then just ask your inbuilt computer to re-skin them to look like Claudia Schiffer or Brad Pitt, says Dr Pearson.

And sex will be transformed when you can share each other's experience by linking your sensory feedback, and refine your actions to suit your partner, he says.

No need to have a child with that person either if they don't suit - instead one could choose from what Dr Pearson calls "E-bay-bies", choosing DNA from sellers on the net.

By 2040 he is predicting people will choose the genetic assembly they prefer for their child, and by 2050, machine-produced humans will be possible.

Scary? Not at all. It is the future we will have to deal with, he says.After all, computers will be more intelligent than humans by 2015, he believes, and this will turn the world topsy-turvy as high-intelligence jobs are outsourced to PCs, while currently undervalued human-relations jobs such as nursing and teaching the mentally disabled will be the prized positions.

All pretty heady stuff for a former phone company to ponder - but all part of making sure the future doesn't broadside us because no one noticed how things were changing, says Dr Pearson.