The supercomputers and software in use have all been designed by human beings, but as Marshall McLuhan once said, "We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us." Since the global Internet and the billions of intelligent devices and machines connected to it---the Global Mind -- represent what is arguably far and away the most powerful tool that human beings have ever used, it should not be surprising that it is beginning to reshape the way we think in ways both trivial and profound -- but sweeping and ubiquitous.

In the same way that multinational corporations have become far more efficient and productive by outsourcing work to other countries and robosourcing work to intelligent, interconnected machines, we as individuals are becoming far more efficient and productive by instantly connecting our thoughts to computers, servers, and databases all over the world. Just as radical changes in the global economy have been driven by a positive feedback loop between outsourcing and robosourcing, the spread of computing power and the increasing number of people connected to the Internet are mutually reinforcing trends. Just as Earth Inc. is changing the role of human beings in the production process, the Global Mind is changing our relationship to the world of information.

The change being driven by the wholesale adoption of the Internet as the principal means of information exchange is simultaneously disruptive and creative. The futurist Kevin Kelly says that our new technological world -- infused with intelligence -- more and more resembles "a very complex organism that often follows its own urges." In this case, the large complex system includes not only the Internet and the computers, but also us.

Consider the impact on conversations. Many of us now routinely reach for smartphones to find the answers to questions that arise at the dinner table by searching the Internet with our fingertips. Indeed, many now spend so much time on their smartphones and other mobile Internet -- connected devices that oral conversation sometimes almost ceases. As a distinguished philosopher of the Internet, Sherry Turkle, recently wrote, we are spending more and more time "alone together."

The deeply engaging and immersive nature of online technologies has led many to ask whether their use might be addictive for some people. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), when it is updated in May 2013, will include "Internet Use Disorder" in its appendix for the first time, as a category targeted for further study. There are an estimated 500 million people in the world now playing online games at least one hour per day. In the United States, the average person under the age of twenty-one now spends almost as much time playing online games as they spend in classrooms from the sixth through twelfth grades. And it's not just young people: the average online social games player is a woman in her mid-forties. An estimated 55 percent of those playing social games in the U.S. -- and 60 percent in the U.K. -- are women. (Worldwide, women also generate 60 percent of the comments and post 70 percent of the pictures on Facebook.)