Until quite recently, if you owned a dog you had to have a dog licence.

I’ve often thought about this, and I have never been able to understand why.

Why just pick on dogs? What about cats, or horses, or even ferrets?

When I first became a registered dog owner, the licence fee was about five shillings, or 25p, so it couldn’t have been a money raising exercise.

Also, when you paid the fee, you would be given a small brass plate that was engraved with the licence number. This little plate, that was intended to be riveted onto the dog’s collar, alone must have cost more than the fee.

But modern times bring new ideas and the little brass plates that were simple and cheap to make have been replaced with ’microchips’, that are neither.

A microchip is a tiny wafer of semi-conducting material that is used to make things called integrated circuits.

I can also tell you that a microchip is just about the size of a grain of rice, and is made from umpteen layers of circuitry. These minute miracles are called ’memory’ and are somehow fastened together by very skilful people with nimble fingers and excellent eyesight, who make circuit boards for computers.

And what do computers do? They make everything else.

Recently, there’s been a television series, called ’Inside the factory’.

They follow a production line manufacturing process, usually food related, that takes the viewer on a trip through the transformation of raw materials that are good for us into finished products that are not.

A few examples of subjects that the programme covered are fish fingers, potato crisps, biscuits and waffles.

All of which, in their own way, are very interesting to watch but are very worrying when you think about what the future holds.

The complete production process from start to finish is automatic. Potatoes are delivered from the farm to the front door of the factory and, a few hours later, they leave by the back door, now made into waffles and packed in boxes ready to be delivered to the freezer cabinets of the supermarkets and, eventually, to our plates.

The same thing applies to most things that we use these days.

Would you believe that the waffle production line that makes tens of thousands of the things every hour, of every day, includes taking a photograph of every single waffle individually?

The goods were loaded into the truck that had probably been built by robots and sent on their way to the delivery address, carefully guided by the sat-nav screen in the cab and tracked by the GPS satellites that circle the earth day and night.

Everything seems to be automated and controlled by computers and microchips.

They guide the traffic on the roads, the ships that sail the seas, and the aircraft that deliver us to New York or New Zealand.

They take care of our hard earned cash in the bank, and sometimes hand it over to the wrong people. They add up our shopping in the supermarkets, and scan and x-ray our bodies so that the doctor can cure our ills.

They can scan the fields and control the amount of fertilizer that is needed to be delivered to every square yard of every acre of every farm. They control the delivery of our gas, electricity and water.

They control everything that we need and do. They control our communications, our phones and our TV.

And, occasionally, things can go wrong.

But I’ll tell you something else. I’d like to see the microchip or computer that can put a Three Legs of Man through the middle of a stick of rock, or make a Bateson’s Pork Pie, with gravy.

I think that we’ll have fish and chips for tea. You can’t go far wrong with a bag of chips.

A decade ago Pullyman - aka Michael Cowin - was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, a condition that affects people in different ways. Michael discovered writing and Island Life is featuring some of his musings. Sometimes topical, sometimes nostalgic, read about life as seen through the eyes of Pullyman