This is a moment to be savored, even as we sound new notes of care and caution about the speed, nature and range of these changes. Part of this process involves getting used to the alien nature and pervasive reach of the many new subintelligences that now surround us. These are the algorithms that talk with us, that watch us, that trade for us, that select dates for us, that suggest what we might buy, sell, or wear. They are the algorithms that pool information about us, and that will slowly permeate the full range of human-built environments, from bridges to roads to cities and more minor intelligent devices.

These are not yet intelligences like our own. But some of their greatest potential lies in the ways we humans might cooperate with them to form new hybrid systems that deliver the best of each. On top of all this, new understandings of the mind and brain are helping to break down the old boundaries between the psychological and the physical, as we learn not just how deeply the body matters to the mind, but also how the brain helps predict and construct the world of human experience.

We now glimpse the next steps in human cultural and cognitive evolution, continuing the trend that started with the arrival of human language and the (much later) invention of writing and the external storage and transmission of ideas. The new steps herald an age of fluidity and demand answers to a host of questions and issues that need to be addressed in conversations like this one. The two most important such questions are simply: How should we negotiate this dauntingly large space of human possibility? And what costs are we willing to tolerate along the way?