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Today's conflicts between the views that the humanities hold of science and engineering and the views science and engineering hold of the humanities weaken the very core of our culture. Their cause is lack of integration in today's education among subjects that hark back to the medieval trivium and quadrivium. A new trivium is needed to provide every educated person with a basic understanding of the endeavors and instruments that help us address our world and shape a new morality—the humanities, in the noblest sense of the word, to civilize, science to understand nature, and engineering, broadly defined, to encompass the kindred activities that modify nature. Integration of these endeavors is urgent. It involves, in turn, an intimate interaction (the "biosoma") of biological organisms, society, and machines—a new quadrivium. No domain can any longer be considered and learned in isolation.

Technological literacy means far more than just the ability to use computers and other machines. It implies an understanding of the factors involved in the creation and development of technologies and of the impacts of technology on society, on individuals, and on the environment. Ignorance of any of these facets can have serious consequences in a future in which technology will play an ever more determinant role. Unfortunately, the importance as well as the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of technological literacy have not yet been perceived by the educational system and used to enrich the content of school curricula and of traditional liberal arts college curricula. The diffusion of technological literacy is an urgent priority in helping shape our culture, in providing a sense of optimism about our future, and in enabling us to avoid the disasters that the neglect of technology has wreaked historically on other societies.

Rapid advances in information and telecommunications technology are offering the possibility of creating a global network (a "hyperbrain") that will enhance by a quantum step our social intelligence, that is, our ability to communicate, learn, work, and make decisions, both individually and collectively. As it further develops, that network will become a truly "hyperintelligent" system that will constitute a major evolutionary advance for our society. Key further steps toward the development of hyperintelligence include extended networks with intelligent terminals, new operational procedures, extension to the networks of functional intelligence capacities such as association, pattern recognition, inference, abstraction and generalization, and logical decision. Particular attention needs to be paid to the possible pathologies of hyperintelligence and the hyperbrain.