Malone - Superminds: the surprising power of people and computers thinking together

Superminds is the first book I have seen that deeply explores the power of information technology to enable truly new forms of human organization. I really love the premise and thoughtfulness of the book, and I highly recommend it if you want to understand and make sense of what we are likely to see in the next few years!

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 of the MIT Media Lab

Thomas Malone was a decade ahead of most of the rest of us in thinking about the future of work. Nowin this fascinating bookhe has done it again, looking ahead to a hyperconnected world and introducing 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

As Tom Malone observes, its usually harder to create the future than to imagine it, but in the case of interacting, networked people (as with Facebook), sometimes its the other way around. The wonderful essence of Toms 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

After helping introduce the phrase future of work in his 2004 book with that name, Tom Malone is back to remind us that the real impact of technology will come not only from AI but also from harnessing human minds at hyperscale. In this terrific, well-researched, and highly readable book, he explores provocatively and practically the opportunities and challenges that superminds will help us address in businesses 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 of the McKinsey Global Institute

Humans plus computers and networks have enormous potential. How can such wee creatures as ourselves take advantage of this potential? In his new book, Malone addresses this question in a concrete way, laying the foundation for a new discipline: the systems engineering of superminds.

Vernor Vinge, Hugo Awardwinning 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 thinka property that emerges from aggregations and organized structures. I may never see a four-legged table the same way again!

Vint Cerf, vice president at Google and one of the fathers of the Internet

A remarkable journey into the basic structuresmarkets, hierarchies, democracies, and morethat 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 for anyone interested in a fresh look at artificial intelligence.

Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School and author of Building the Future

Supermind is an English word that means a powerful combination of many individual minds. This book is the story of superminds on our planet. Well see that the history of humanity is largely the history of human superminds, of how humans in groupslike hierarchies, communities, markets, and democraciesaccomplished things that individual humans could never have done alone.

More important, well see how crucial computers will be for the superminds in our future. For a long time, the most important contribution of computers wont be artificial intelligence; it will be hyperconnectivityconnecting human minds to each other in new ways and at unprecedented scales. But over time, computers will also do more and more of the complex kinds of thinking that only humans do today.

This book is not primarily about how computers will do things people used to do. Its about how people and computers together will do things that were never possible before. Its about how human-computer superminds will be smarter than anything our world has ever seen. And its about how we can use these new kinds of collective intelligence to help solve some of our most important problems in business, government, and many other parts of society.