The benefits of any truly transformative technology are at first exaggerated, but their long-term effects surprise everyone. At the moment, mesh networks are experiencing such misvaluation. Their promoters (and they are many) now describe them with hyperbolic enthusiasm; but in the end they will be the mechanism by which machine intelligence becomes like electricity -- that is, invisible and ubiquitous.

Mesh networks are not so very new: their conceptual lineage dates back to packet radio, a kind of digital data transmission used by amateur radio hackers in the 1970s. But investments in more reliable and intelligent networks made during the 1990s by the U.S. Department of Defense renewed interest in meshes; and within the last five years, academic institutions like MIT's Media Lab and startups like Aeria, BelAir Networks, Ember, MeshNetworks (now owned by Motorola), and Tropos Networks have rapidly advanced the technology. (Disclosure: Ember's chairman and acting chief executive, Bob Metcalfe, also serves on Technology Review's board.)