Pierre Levy sees us as moving past an information economy into an economy based on human interactions; a social economy. While the idea may seem startling, given our current emphasis on all things monetary, his reasoning makes you stop and give careful thought to ideas you may not have considered before. As technology advances, Levy points out, it's capable of taking on more and more advanced tasks--first simple labor and now the processing of information. As these capabilities become easier and well within everyone's reach, their value declines.

For the first time in history, more employees work with their minds than with their muscles. Their value lies in their mental abilities and their knowledge. Collectively, they are the "mind" of the company -- a mind spread across many individual brains. The authors of this breakthrough book call it "the distributed mind."

The distributed mind is a powerful force, for if two heads are better than one, imagine how much better 20 heads are -- if it is possible to manage them all! That's the fascinating subject of this book: how progressive companies are creating teams of "knowledge workers" and coordinating their individual efforts into a web of high performance.

Spanning from the Big Bang to the Information Age and beyond goes back to the beginning of time to take the reader on a flowing fascinating journey to our current world and our possible future. Extracting from the realities of today's unprecedented technological growth, ecological imbalance, political strife and emerging social-awareness author Peter Russell supposes that we are on the verge of a major planetary transformation-which in all of human and planetary history has never been so dangerous or promising.

In this visionary book, Gregory Stock gives us a new way of understanding our world and our future. He develops the provocative thesis that human society has become an immense living being - a global superorganism in which we humans, knitted together by our modern technology and communication, are like the cells in an animal's body. Drawing on impressive research, Stock shows this newly formed superorganism to be more than metaphor; it is an actual living creature, which he has named "Metaman," meaning "beyond and transcending humans." This name acknowledges humanity's key role in the superorganism but also stresses that Metaman is more than humanity alone. Our increasing reliance on new technologies has joined us inextricably to our technology, while at the same time it has bound humanity together. The examples are all around us: our medical equipment and drugs, high-yield crop strains, superhighways, power and telecommunications networks. All these are part of Metaman. The implications of the new global culture and economy, the evolution of machine intelligence, and the advent of genetic engineering are vast.