It is called the Spark Room and it takes pride of place in the shiny new offices of Logica, the technology firm in King’s Cross, north London. A sign above the door reads “This is where you come in”. It is an invitation to the firm’s geeks to peer into the future, laptops in one hand, lattes in the other.

On computer screens, what looks to the untrained eye like a series of dots and squiggles, graphs and web pages are downloading at great speed.

Each one represents people: you and me. They move, like us. They talk, like us. They are us.

The images are the building blocks of the biggest revolution in IT since the advent of the internet — and one that will eventually have a direct impact on the lives of almost everyone.

“We’re not talking about something that we’ve always known would be good but could not work out how to make happen,” explained Elaine Doherty, Logica’s head of media innovation. “What we’re doing is something that was unimaginable even five years ago.”

Doherty is talking about “collective intelligence”, or “the network”. It is the latest buzzword to leak out of California’s Silicon Valley.

For a big idea it is remarkably simple. It means a world in which people are permanently connected to anything and everything: to our friends and families, to our employer, to our home, doctor, bank, even to our past, present and future.

The squiggles and dots on Doherty’s screens represent those links, produced by a complex — and secret — algorithm that runs using Logica’s new Interaction software.

How does it work? It is all down to the mobile phone. Thanks to hardware advances and super-fast 3G network connections, phones have become handheld mini-computers capable of running just about any program you can think of — e-mail, online maps, YouTube, news, the weather, share prices.

If you don’t have one yet, the likelihood is that you will soon. The new-generation phones are spreading rapidly through the population. Apple launched its latest version of the iPhone last week and has already sold more than 40m examples of the previous models in just two years. Worldwide there is one mobile phone for every adult.

As we use them, our phones record the details of our lives. Global positioning technology, wi-fi and Bluetooth in our handsets reveal where we are down to the nearest few feet, when we go to work, when we get home and where we like to go at weekends. For the fully plugged-in, an online calendar shows where we have just been and where we will be next. Social networking sites reveal who our friends are. Location services reveal where they are.

Thanks to our online search history, phones know our interests: what food, music, sports, authors, fashion designers and holiday destinations we like. When we start using our handsets as “swipe-and-pay” wallets, in a similar style to London’s transport Oyster cards, they will record our purchases as well.