We have created an online world whose vastness exceeds our comprehension. As a measure of its magnitude, consider this: In 2012, the new Internet address system, IPv6, created more than 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. That should be sufficient to service the 5 billion devices that currently connect to the internet, and the 22 billion devices forecast to be in use by 2020.
The hard part of the connectivity explosion is not building capacity, but how it should be managed. We must answer profound questions about the way we live. Should everyone be permanently connected to everything?
Who owns which data, and how should information be made public?