Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen

Facebook, with its 900 million members (only India and China now have more residents), is on the brink of a $100-billion stock market launch that will be the largest in history. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees this as just the beginning of his company's transformation of the world.

Zuckerberg, who Forbes ranked this year as the 9th most powerful person in the world, eventually wants to connect everybody -- all 8 billion human beings -- on the planet. And he wants Facebook to not only become the internet's operating system but also the platform upon which we do all our digital business.

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Google, meanwhile, has become so powerful that it is now investing many millions of dollars not only in futuristic projects like virtual reality glasses and self-driving cars, but it is also proposing to finance space ships designed to mine nearby asteroids that will supposedly "add trillions of dollars to the global GDP."

Google has just got its first license to operate its self-driving cars, but will it need and apply for a similar license to finance the exploration of space in its pursuit of "human progress?"