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With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.

My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.

In order to thrive in the 21st century, you have to be a savvy citizen of the digital economy or risk being left behind.

The pace at which people are taking to digital technology defies our stereotypes of age, education, language and income.

When technology reaches that level of invisibility in our lives, that's our ultimate goal. It vanishes into our lives. It says, 'You don't have to do the work; I'll do the work.'

While the digital age has done so much to improve our world, it has dramatically changed our social structure, often further isolating us from each other.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.

Industrial capitalism brought representative democracy, but with a weak public mandate and inert citizenry. The digital age offers a new democracy based on public deliberation and active citizenship.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we're now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.