The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.

When you're sharing the music, you're not buying the CD. When you're sharing that video, you're not buying the TV. But we thought, really, there'd be a firewall. While near-zero marginal cost would impact virtual goods, we never thought it would move over to the physical world.

We need a game plan to deploy it very quickly to both move the economy forward and create the new businesses and jobs, and address climate change. It's a pretty big task. Pretty challenging.

Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.

We're creating multiple personas. We're creating a thespian sense of personality where we see ourselves as works of art, and we see everything in our environment as a prop, as a set, as a stage, as a backdrop for filling ourselves in. We don't see ourselves as ever completed. We are in-formation.

We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.

It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.