Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone (PDF)

Description

From the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence comes a fascinating look at the remarkable capacity for intelligence exhibited by groups of people and computers working together. If you’re like most people, you probably believe that humans are the most intelligent animals on our planet. But there’s another kind of entity that can be far smarter: groups of people. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Malone, the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, shows how groups of people working together in superminds — like hierarchies, markets, democracies, and communities — have been responsible for almost all human achievements in business, government, science, and beyond. And these collectively intelligent human groups are about to get much smarter. Using dozens of striking examples and case studies, Malone shows how computers can help create more intelligent superminds simply by connecting humans to one another in a variety of rich, new ways. And although it will probably happen more gradually than many people expect, artificially intelligent computers will amplify the power of these superminds by doing increasingly complex kinds of thinking. Together, these changes will have far-reaching implications for everything from the way we buy groceries and plan business strategies to how we respond to climate change, and even for democracy itself. By understanding how these collectively intelligent groups work, we can learn how to harness their genius to achieve our human goals. Drawing on cutting-edge science and insights from a remarkable range of disciplines, Superminds articulates a bold — and utterly fascinating — picture of the future that will change the ways you work and live, both with other people and with computers.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “A book rich in speculation about how collective thinking might solve big problems such as climate change; of interests to fans of Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and other big-picture thinkers.”―Kirkus Reviews”Deeply explores the power of information technology to enable truly new forms of human organization. Highly recommended.”―Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder”From the father of collective intelligence, a refreshingly realistic view of how computers will supercharge collective intelligence and how these superminds can help us tackle the most complex problems that face the world today.”―Joi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab, and author of Whiplash”In this fascinating book, Tom Malone introduces us to new vistas of human capability and creativity achievable through collective intelligence. By thinking imaginatively about our future, Malone helps us think differently about the present.”―Anne Marie-Slaughter, CEO of New America and author of Unfinished Business”Tom Malone puts worries about artificial intelligence in perspective, explaining why AI works best when combined with humans in superminds. What makes a supermind more or less intelligent is just one of many surprises in this fascinating book.”―Patrick Winston, former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and author of Artificial Intelligence”The wonderful essence of Tom Malone’s book is to imagine how people and computers will interact on a massive scale to create intelligent systems. And by imagining them in advance, we have some hope of nudging them in a positive direction.”―Esther Dyson, executive founder of Way to Wellville and author of Release 2.1″In this terrific, well-researched, and highly readable book, Tom Malone explores provocatively and practically the opportunities and challenges that superminds will help us address in business and society. Leaders who care about harnessing the power of human minds in a world enabled by digital technologies must read this book.”―James Manyika, Chairman, McKinsey Global Institute”Humans plus computers and networks have enormous potential. How can such wee creatures as ourselves take advantage of this potential? Malone addresses this question in a concrete way, laying the foundation for a new discipline: the systems engineering of superminds.”―Vernor Vinge, Hugo Award-winning science fiction author, and originator of the “technological singularity” concept.”Malone takes us on an intentional journey into thinking about thought, intelligence, reasoning, and consciousness. He sees these notions in extremely broad terms that have changed my views of what it means to ‘think.'”―Vint Cerf, VP, Google, and one of the “fathers of the Internet””A remarkable journey into the basic structures — markets, hierarchies, democracies and more — that have advanced civilization throughout history and now bring us to a turning point where the complex problems facing humanity can be addressed by people and computers working together in totally new ways. A must read.”―Amy Edmondson, professor, Harvard Business School, and author of Building the Future”The story of human civilization has fundamentally been the story of coordination: in families, tribes, markets, nations. The challenge we now face is learning how to collaborate at an unprecedented scale, with both human and nonhuman partners alike — be they institutions, decentralized networks or intelligent machines. Superminds opens a window into what may be the defining question of the coming century.”―Brian Christian, author of Algorithms to Live By”Superminds offers a fascinating deep dive into the science of collective human intelligence, and how communities of minds may ultimately be integrated with AI to produce a new, composite super-intelligence that might soon be leveraged to help solve some of humanity’s most pressing problems.”―Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots About the Author Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management, a professor of information technology, and a professor of work and organizational studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and was one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on “Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century.” Malone is the author of The Future of Work and more than 100 articles, research papers, and book chapters. He has also been a cofounder of four software companies; an inventor on 11 patents; and a co-editor of four books.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I am posting this review for my husband, who read the book. Even though he has an Amazon account, we purchase through the Prime account that I own. Amazon, therefore, won’t let him post his review under his account because “he” hasn’t bought anything. A rant for another day. Here’s the review …In his newest book, Professor Malone defines a supermind to be a group of individuals working together in ways that seem to be intelligent. Building from this definition he writes a broadly accessible story opening our eyes to several important trends. Malone points out that superminds have been with us for a long time. What is new is their scale, inclusiveness and access to the vast stores of data and knowledge made possible by computer mediation and vastly faster communications speeds. He gives interesting examples of how superminds are on the verge of making smarter hierarchies, democracies, marketplaces, communities, and even ecosystems along with insights from his and others’ research including the discovery that the more women involved in a supermind the better they perform (perhaps up to 100%).Culture, economies, religions and technology all spring from supermind-like collaborations, some of which are as tightly knit as the family, others as vast as nation states. However, sometimes it seems we are like fish in the sea, and can hardly notice the water in which we swim. Looking through the lens Malone provides we see with new eyes that schools, churches, armies, political parties, and governments, essentially everything in our world is made of groups of people, working together to solve problems and advance their interests. More and more, all of these groups are using communication and computing technologies to help them achieve their goals. Superminds are everywhere!How did we fail to notice these groups as something particularly special? Sometimes it comes down to just having a name. Naming is the first important thing Malone brings to our awareness; that, and that superminds are everywhere and that we are, and always have been immersed in them. They are power.Beyond theory and broad examples, Malone discusses practical ways that superminds can and are being used to make smarter decisions, ranging from strategic business plans to global actions for climate change. He describes these emerging methods as a kind of cyber-human strategy machine, which enables huge groups to participate in creating new ideas and allows their voices in the evaluations and implementations thereby broadening the whole definition of a world community.A particularly interesting example from the book is the use of “Contest Webs” in the Climate Colaboratory’s non-hierarchical proposal process. By modeling the way supply chains work with multiple higher-level integrators in market economies this proposal process allows subprojects from multiple proposers to be included in competing higher level projects, which essentially creates a knowledge supply chain financially supported by several winning, higher level projects. This has benefits in knowledge sharing and cost controls and might be widely useful in proposal processes more generally.He closes with an exploration of what such a supermind might want, and suggests that it should want to be wise, not just smart and powerful, saying that “exploring space, advancing science and art, developing intelligent machines and exploring new forms of collective human consciousness could all be worthy goals for a wise global mind.”He presents a convincing case that superminds are a bridge to an unimaginable future, even as he suggests that our jobs are not immediately at risk. He may be overly optimistic. The world is likely to be alive with computational minds sooner than we suppose, even if it seems farfetched today. Quibbles about the time aside, we surely stand on the cusp of such machines.Malone wrote this book to capture this moment between mostly human superminds and a new world with intelligent and potentially wise, potentially non-human superminds – a world that we little understand and can hardly envision, which is why his book is interesting and important.Perhaps his future research will examine how criminal organizations, too, are superminds and so are evil governments and war-criminal militaries. History suggests that, like individual human minds, these broader superminds can also be mentally deranged. The subject deserves a much deeper look; there is much to be studied and much yet to be published. Certainly, the benefits and risks of including at least a few humans in superminds must be closely examined; in moments of conflict, hybrid superminds may be too timid, or to slow to prevail.Indeed, the program OpenAI Five recently [Science (361) 6403 pp 632-633, 17 August, 2018] beat a team of professional players (i.e., a hybrid-supermind) in the game Data2, a popular, online combat/strategy game, with millions of players around the world. That OpenAI Five already plays at, or beyond superhuman levels against such a ‘supermind’ should makes us considerably more interested the questions Malone raises.Let us hope that we jointly manage to create “insanely great” superminds, not plain, old-fashioned insane ones, and that we are prepared to control the risks as humans cede more and more control to the computational parts of these superminds.–George Davidson

⭐There is a lot written about artificial intelligence(AI) but this book is the best. Dr. Malone breaks it down, starting with clearly defining what is AI. He provides a lot of history and context for the evolution of AI and how we got to where we are at. He also explores the beauty and amazing capabilties of the human mind….which we are still way off from fully understanding and replicating with a computer. He summarizes that the real benefit in AI is when it is a Machine + Human combined together with many examples and data. It’s optimistic for humans, realistic, but also brings into light how jobs will change in the future. I highly recommend to young adults in or heading off to college, parents, or anyone interested in AI. Makes you think about the future, based in a solid grounding of the past and not hyperbole around the capabilities of AI vs the human mind.

⭐This book has had such an impact in our work, my colleagues and I are completely restructuring our project around the perspective of superminds and collective intelligence offered by Prof. Malone. In fact, the book has become a must-read for anyone joining our organization, as it is the most comprehensive tool available for onboarding people to a collective project.Prof. Malone offers a holistic approach to analyzing mechanisms in which groups of people working alongside with machines can be more effective. He introduces the works and findings by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence in a highly digestible format at the reach of non-academics, while offering references to specific papers and studies at the same time. He explores empirical evidence and existing projects solving real problems by harnessing the potential of groups of people working towards a common goal.The book offers a perspective on the world… a frame of reference by which it is possible to understand why the world is what it is by analyzing the ways in which people, corporations, governments and all sorts of entities interact. But, most importantly, it offers a perspective on how humans can come together and collaborate, empowered by new technologies, to reshape the very structures of the world as we know it.

⭐From the first few pages I was drawn into this fascinating topic by the author’s engaging, highly readable style. As an average non-fiction reader, I really appreciate the way Malone takes complex information and ideas, and presents them in a clear, digestible and entertaining way. I found myself gaining new perspectives on how groups work and ways technology helps them work smarter. The author challenges assumptions like ‘the smarter the members, the smarter the group.’ The truth, as he points out, is far more interesting. He also shares lots of juicy, intriguing facets of his research, such as how women improve a group’s collective IQ. I often thought, this is good stuff that I can actually use in my own life! I love NPR’s Radiolab, and part of this book’s appeal is that it has the same ability to take a topic, even one we think we already understand, and give us fresh insights into age-old human and group dynamics while illuminating the incredible possibilities powered by the use of ever-accelerating computer technology. Excellent read!

⭐We are running an open source project called Advanced Algos, about a crowd of developers and traders developing trading bots and putting them to compete between each other. After competing, the source code is opened and the crowd can fork the winners, creating an environment of rapid bot evolution. Once we though we had it all, we came across Superminds, which helped us understand that if we as a project (supermind) organize ourselves with the right tools and seek maximizing our collective intelligence, we are at the same time minimizing the time needed for a “Superalgo” (able to outperform everyone at the markets) to emerge. Congratulations Professor Malone!

⭐The first few chapters had a solid scientific evidence-base, were well written, and very interesting; but a truckload of conjecture thereafter. I also felt the book deviated too much between two very different topics: human groups in a face-to-face and human groups in online settings (with a stronger emphasis on latter than the former). It also veered too far in the direction of ‘groups are always awesome’ territory without paying much attention to the downside of groups (e.g., groupthink, collective stupidity, coordination losses, etc.). Although this book was interesting and thought provoking, I cannot say that I have many definitive lessons or ‘take home’ points to offer other than the proposition that many businesses may improve if they use automated algorithms to amass data and make decisions rather than simply using our traditional methods of joint-decisions making boards or leadership Vito power. That said, I would still recommend reading this book as there is a true shortage of good books on the topic as yet.

⭐Good

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