This is a really awesome book that explains what that it is and how it might work.

Race Against the Machine,

by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-Accelerating-...

It has some ideas on how to get from where we are to there. I think the philosophies of Race Against the Machine and Capital in the 21st century are pretty insightful and the truth may be somewhere in between the two.