The world seems to be on the verge of another "great transformation," with changes far more profound than news-grabbing economic or geopolitical headlines about Asia's economic rise or the fires in the Middle East.
The coming changes will fundamentally redefine the nature of our economic interactions — and the social dynamics that underlie them.
This is a transformation on the scale of the shift, more than 8,000 years ago, from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to settled agricultural ones, which eventually led to the rise of cities.