Speaking during the royal visit to South Korea, he said technicians, computer programmers and managers needed to be trained in ethics and morality.

Prince Philip told an Anglo-Korean business conference in Seoul: "Information technology has produced immense benefits for humanity, but only when it is used with honesty and integrity."

He said there was a danger of technology being exploited without "a thought for ethics or morality".

'Internet is fantastic'

The duke, who is accompanying The Queen on their first royal visit to Korea, said: "The Internet is a fantastic development but it is difficult to estimate the harm it can do when it is exploited by the peddlers of pornography and other crooks.

A Korean drummer, dressed in tartan in honour of the royal visit, outside a Seoul department store

"Innovation and globalisation sound splendid, provided they are not being led by unscrupulous managers and clever criminals."

He added: "The opportunities that technology offer to humanity are greater than ever but so are the risks."

Prince Philip said the world's cyber community faced a challenge of finding ways of combining high-quality technical training with a proper grounding in ethics and morality.

"Without it, future generations will inherit a depleted and degraded natural environment and a steeply declining capital fund of natural assets," he said.

The duke said he feared the world was in danger of getting "carried away" by what technology could for humanity.

'Progress is not always desirable'

He said: "Just because certain developments are possible does not mean that they are automatically desirable.

"We have already witnessed the damage caused to the environment by the inadvertent pollution of the atmosphere, the waters and the land.

"It has also become only too obvious that we are over-exploiting the world's natural forests and the natural resources of the oceans."

Korean businessmen heard Prince Philip warn: "Money economics, industrial technology and the size of the human population cannot exist independently of the world's fund of natural capital resources.

"After all, every housewife knows what happens if you squander the family's capital assets and every economist should know what will happen if we continue to squander the world's capital assets."