Here's the future: our cars drive themselves, computers run our homes, robots have taken our jobs and they perform surgery and fight our wars. In this world we are useless.

This is not fantasy: it is beginning right now.

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli academic who teaches a course on the history of everything.

He is one of the world's most in-demand thinkers and speakers: an oracle for the robot age.

Harari has published a global best-selling book Homo Sapiens, charting the course of humanity's journey and what gave us mastery over the planet.

Now, Harari has turned his attention to humanity's next big frontier: we become like gods. In his latest book, Homo Deus, he argues that as a species "we acquire for us divine powers of creating and destruction".

His vision is at times inspiring and chilling: Harari believes that "there is no soul", we really worship ourselves. And in this new high-tech future, "our world of meaning might collapse within decades".

In Harari's future we are economically redundant, but that doesn't matter. He imagines a global wage where we are paid to enjoy ourselves and pursue happiness while the robots do the work. We are, indeed, gods.

Religion, and other virtuality games

What do these new gods do? Says Harari, invent new religions.

He sees humans existing in 3D virtual worlds, he says providing us with "more excitement and emotional engagement than the 'real world' outside".

"In the past, we have called these virtual reality games 'religions'," he says.

From doing the work of people to fighting humanity's wars, the powers that be have much in store for robots. ( Reuters: Stringer )

Harari says "what is religion if not a big virtual reality game": we set out rules and tell stories that exist "only in the human imagination".

Is this god-like future some sort of utopia? Or is it a brave new world where we surrender to machines?

Is a life of driverless cars, robot doctors and endless hours in cyberspace a meaningful life? Are we sowing the seeds of our demise?

There is a possibility that rather than becoming gods, we become enslaved to artificial intelligence that is more intelligent than us.

The spooky realm of quantum technology

These are enormous questions, and greats minds are grappling with our fate.

They are pondering the challenges of what is known as "strange physics": a world of science bent out of shape, beyond ordinary understanding and still revealing itself.

The language around this tells us of how otherworldly it is. It has been called the spooky realm of quantum technology.

In their paper The Leap Into Quantum Technology: A Primer for National Security Professionals, Richard Fontaine and Michael J Biercuk capture the essence of this weirdness where:

"The predictable view of the world breaks down, and in its place are new rules that seem counterintuitive at best and completely at odds with reality at worst."

Are humanoid robots, such as this one at the WRC 2016 World Robot Conference in Beijing, a sign of things to come? ( Reuters: Thomas Peter )

Quantum mechanics has been with us for a century. It is known as the science of the small, how matter behaves at atomic and sub-atomic levels: it helped explain what classical physics could not.

At the quantum level matter does not exist as fixed-absolute: it can exist simultaneously in more than one place; what is known as a "superposition".

As Fontaine and Biercuk write: "But it gets stranger. Upon observation, the quantum system 'chooses' just one possibility, and the superposition collapses."

Quantum physics, when it was first uncovered, changed our world: it gave rise to the transistor and laser. But in the 1980s there was a new breakthrough opening up an acceleration of the computer age. This is called the second quantum revolution.

The potential of this revolution is mind-boggling: what we would have called science fiction is getting closer to science fact — the development of a quantum computer that can travel through time.

How? Warps in space-time — wormholes — could allow a quantum particles to pass through.

China leading race to militarise robots

But that is still years away. In the meantime a new high-tech race is on to harness the potential of quantum technology.

And it threatens to upset the world order. As with everything China is front and centre, investing heavily in artificial intelligence and robotics.

The Centre for Intelligence Research and Analysis released a paper in 2016, China's Industrial and Military Robotics Developments. It points out that China had already surpassed Japan as the world's largest market for industrial robots.

It says that China is stealing a march on rival the United States that will "erode US competitive advantages, and contribute to China's defence industrial capabilities".

People's Liberation Army soldiers demonstrate dancing robots designed by cadets at the PLA Armoured Forces Engineering Academy. ( Reuters: Petar Kujundzic )

This is a new front in a possible looming war between the global super-powers: in fact some argue the war has already begun in cyberspace.

China's 2015 Defence White Paper outlined what it called a "world revolution in military affairs", focusing on long-range, smart, unmanned weapons.

Last year The New York Times published an article with the heading: Is China Outsmarting America in AI?

At a time, it said, when President Donald Trump is cutting funding to government agencies exploring artificial intelligence, the Chinese are ploughing more money in.

The article said the US Defence Department was concerned that Chinese money was pouring into American artificial intelligence companies that the US had looked to to develop future weapons systems.

China's Jinan Project: The unhackable computer

The Chinese may be getting a first look at American military technology right under the noses of the US Government.

China's leader, Xi Jinping, has seized on this new world as part of his "China Dream". China has coined a phrase "wangluo qiangguo", translated as "cyber superpower", combining what it calls the basic principles of Marxism with the high-tech age.

China has announced its Jinan Project to build the world's first unhackable computer network.

In the future we may — as Yuval Noah Harari says — be gods: we may invent our own "'religions" in virtual worlds.

We may just as easily be slaves to technology: our place at the helm of our world supplanted by the robots we created.

The future may indeed be unwritten, but as in all things right now — the future may belong to China.

Matter of Fact with Stan Grant is on the ABC News Channel at 9pm, Monday to Thursday.