Tim O’Reilly is a marvelously astute observer of the evolution of emerging technologies, and how humans interact with them. But unfortunately, his political views are of a drearily conventional Krugmanite hue. Alas, nobody’s perfect. I greatly enjoyed his essay on the “birth of the global mind.” Among other things, he describes the technological distance between Stanley, a driverless vehicle that won a DARPA competition in 2005 after having successfully traversed a seven mile source, and Google’s autonomous vehicle, which has successfully driven over 100,000 miles with the aid of data collected by Google’s human Street View team. The feedback between data gathered by people and the machines that store the data in the cloud and analyze it is fueling an increase in our collective intelligence.

One can already see the potential of this kind of human-machine symbiosis in the sharing platforms that are in many respects strengthening the advantages of dense communities over less-dense communities; indeed, as Matt Sherman of Alikewise and Stack Overflow has put it, density can be understood as high-broadband interactivity. And human-machine symbiosis will inevitably shape public policy, in good ways but also in ways that many of us will find discomfiting.