sensation alive to the pull of constant, instant connection. This Seventh Sense reacts to what none of our other senses can notice, to the subtle undercurrents of a networked age. That moment of first connection you once had - to a computer, a friend, a fast-moving financial product, a miracle medical cure, an idea, a smashed up sound - is like the first time you looked at a Matisse painting or heard Beethoven (or Orbital). It switched on a new sensibility. But you have probably had - or will shortly - another moment. This is the instant a cold and creeping chill hits you, started by the uneasy sensation that something you've done has been recorded or predicted or watched and manipulated in some way you'd not quite imagined. That some strange force from a great distance has slammed into your life. This feeling is the sudden shudder of a bill come surprisingly due: You wanted to be connected? Okay, here’s the cost. And the addition on both sides of the ledger, the massive benefits of our links and the rather terrible potential of those same threads, is still being settled. We can say at least that the sum of all the revolutions wrought by the instant mingling of the world’s soon-to-be connected billions with each other and with machine intelligence, biological innovation and the tremors of a globalizing world will be, to use Master Nan’s word, “epochal.” Most of us find ourselves torn now. Not just between future and past; not merely between the habits and loves of a slower age and the ceaslesss promise of something fast and new. We are trapped, as well, between two groups. An older generation now in power, blind to the laws of networks and connection, uses old ideas to battle problems of a connected age and makes them worse, ever faster. Terrorism. Financial chasms. Environmental imbalance. At the same time, an emergent class of powerful technologists fingers more influence than perhaps any group in history. Machines watch, learn, think and increasingly control near