What’s driving us toward this new era—wherein computers provide context to our data, and they also allow machines to anticipate our next need—is a fundamental change in the Internet itself. We live in a world that is always connected. We’re always on social networks: checking our news feeds, sharing articles, and publishing pictures. We’re digitally collecting personal health data, monitoring our sleep patterns using wearable sensors and our weight via Wi-Fi–powered scales. These information streams, when combined with the substantial decline in the computing cost of crunching all that data, allow our machines to sense our needs. This idea of anticipatory computing is going to be the next big change in our relationship with computers. And it’s coming more quickly than you realize.