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The World Wide Mind is an idea. The World Wide Mind is a concept.

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So what I tried to do in the book is talk about the World Wide Mind as a coming global intelligence.

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And I mean that in the sense of an intelligence with an intentionality and a consciousness of its own,

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entirely part of human intelligence. And what I try to do is get away from the science fiction

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idea that the internet by itself is going to become intelligent. I think that's an absurd idea.

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That's like saying that putting a bunch of transistors together will just get you a radio automatically.

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I don't think that's going to happen. The argument I make is that the World Wide Mind is a combination

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of humans and the internet acting together in concert, and that the combination of the two yield to being,

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which is more power than either in isolation. And that, I argue, gives you the seed of an intelligence that neither has by itself.

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And that's what I think of as the World Wide Mind.

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It's very legitimate to worry that the internet is alienating us from each other.

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You only have to look at figures like the average teenager sends and receives 2,272 texts per month,

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and some teenagers send 14 or 20,000 texts in a month.

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So when you look at numbers like that, you really can't avoid the conclusion that

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they're spending more time looking at the screen than they are looking at people.

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And the argument I make is that you can't really stop that hunger to be connected. You can't stop that urge to look at the screen.

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The argument that I make in the book is that you can incorporate that urge, and by actually fusing technology

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with the body to make that connection through technology a physical connection,

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a connection that you make as part of your own internal bonding experience.

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Here is my own human machine connection. I've got two cochlear implants.

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So what I wear on my ear is a processor where sound goes in the microphone, gets processed by the

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unit here into ones and zeros and the data is sent to a headpiece, which is a radio transmitter with a magnet in it.

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And the magnet will stick to the implant that's in my head. And it's sending data through my skin to that implant.

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And there are electrodes that connect to my auditory nerves that send little pulses of electricity to my auditory nerves

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that recreate the sensation of hearing for me.

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So I'm a guy who actually has 32 electrodes and tens of thousands,

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actually hundreds of thousands of transistors in his head.

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What I hope that we'll learn is that there is a new way to think about how technology

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and human relationships can be brought together.

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Right now people think of these domains as mutually exclusive.

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And what I suggest in the book is that there is a way to put these worlds together

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with physical integration of humans and machines.

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You know, I don't claim that this is something that's around the corner.

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But I do draw from my own personal experience of having a cochlear implant.

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So it is a daily reality of my life to boot up my ear in the morning

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by putting on the processor of my cochlear implant and having it activate

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the computer chips that are in my head.

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So what I'm really trying to say is that technology can be used

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to create more humane connections between people.