Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together - Thomas Malone

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Copyright

2018

Preface

the history of humanity is largely the history of human superminds, of how humans in groups—like hierarchies, communities, markets, and democracies—accomplished things that individual humans could never have done alone. More important, we’ll see how crucial computers will be for the superminds in our future

• Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress

For a long time, the most important contribution of computers won’t be artificial intelligence; it will be hyperconnectivity—connecting 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.

how people and computers together will do things that were never possible before.

Introduction

In January 2009, Tim Gowers posted a blog entry that would make history

In a blog post titled “Is Massively Collaborative Mathematics Possible?” Gowers invited anyone on the Internet who was interested to collaborate in proving the theorem

he gave his group the task of proving the Hales-Jewett theorem, which is part of an esoteric branch of mathematics that has applications in computer science and other fields.

By mid-March, the participants had solved the core of the problem. By the end of May, there had been over 1,500 comments in which 39 different people made substantive contributions. A

almost every one of the 39 substantive participants contributed influential content

But in a sense, these digital-age accomplishments are all just examples of one of the oldest stories in the history of humanity. The story goes like this: “There was a problem. Different people worked on different parts of it. Together, the group solved the problem better than any of the individuals could have solved it alone.”

Compared to “simple” problems like these, trying to solve big societal problems like what to do about climate change, crime, war, poverty, health care, and education is far more complex and requires far more people. One name for the ability to solve problems well is intelligence

We’ll call the intelligence of groups collective intelligence, and this book is the story of that ubiquitous—but often invisible—kind of intelligence

human progress has been mostly a story of what groups of people—not individuals—have accomplished

over time, information technologies—like writing and the printing press—allowed groups to become dramatically larger and more intelligent

Most important, we’ll see that we are now in the early stages of another dramatic change in collective intelligence, this time enabled by new electronic information technologies

A SHORT HISTORY OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Agriculture

Industry

WHO ARE THESE COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCES?

HOW CAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY MAKE SUPERMINDS SMARTER?

HOW CAN SUPERMINDS HELP SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS?

1. Would You Recognize a Supermind If You Saw It on the Street?

Collective intelligence—the result of groups of individuals acting together in ways that seem intelligent.

WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?

2. Can a Group Take an Intelligence Test?

MEASURING INDIVIDUAL INTELLIGENCE

AN INTELLIGENCE TEST FOR GROUPS

DOES THE TEST WORK?

WHAT MAKES A GROUP SMART?

SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE IS A KEY TO COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

COGNITIVE DIVERSITY MATTERS, TOO

DO COLLECTIVELY INTELLIGENT GROUPS LEARN FASTER?

WHAT ELSE DOES COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE PREDICT?

MEASURING COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

HOW ELSE COULD WE MEASURE COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE?

You Can Observe a Lot by Watching

Sometimes You Have to Do Something

3. How Will People Work with Computers?

WHAT ROLES WILL COMPUTERS PLAY RELATIVE TO HUMANS?

Tools

Assistants

Peers

Managers

WHAT WILL ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT MACHINES LOOK LIKE? (HINT: NOTHING)

The Exceptions: Where Will We Want Robots That Look Like Humans?

HOW WILL WE COMMUNICATE WITH COMPUTERS?

4. How Much General Intelligence Will Computers Have? (AGI)

WHEN (IF EVER) WILL MACHINES REALLY HAVE GENERAL INTELLIGENCE?

WHAT’S SO HARD ABOUT PROGRAMMING COMPUTERS?

WHAT PATHS MIGHT LEAD TO GENERAL AI?

Commonsense Knowledge

Big Data

Machine Learning

Neuromorphic Computing

WILL GENERAL AI BE A FORM OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE?

HOW CAN AI HELP MAKE GROUPS SMARTER?

5. How Can Groups of People and Computers Think More Intelligently?

PERFECT COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

A Perfectly Intelligent Company

WHAT ARE THE COGNITIVE PROCESSES NEEDED IN AN INTELLIGENT SYSTEM?

6. Smarter Hierarchies

HOW CAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY MAKE HIERARCHIES SMARTER?

Mostly Automated Hierarchies

Decentralization

Example: Valve Corporation (Valve Software)

7. Smarter Democracies

HOW WILL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY MAKE DEMOCRACIES SMARTER?

VOTING AS A WAY OF REPRESENTING THE DESIRES OF VOTERS

Liquid Democracy, Pirate Parties, and Voting Agents

VOTING AS A WAY OF FINDING WHAT’S TRUE

The Good Judgment Project

VOTING SEPARATELY FOR FACTS AND VALUES

8. Smarter Markets

HOW WILL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY MAKE MARKETS SMARTER?

Predictions as a Kind of Decision

Using Markets to Make Predictions (prediction market)

Taking Cyber-Human Prediction Markets Even Further

Cyber-Human Markets for Everything

9. Smarter Communities

HOW WILL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY MAKE COMMUNITIES SMARTER?

HOW CAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY HELP COMMUNITIES ACHIEVE WORK-RELATED GOALS?

Consensus Decision Making in Wikipedia

Communities of Practice (community of practice)

WILL ONLINE COMMUNITIES MAKE THEIR MEMBERS HAPPIER?

HOW DOES TECHNOLOGY AFFECT THE BOUNDARIES OF A COMMUNITY? (membrane)

TECHNOLOGY FOR ACHIEVING MORE INTELLIGENT CONSENSUS

Public Disputations (Disputation Arena)

COULD INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ENABLE CYBER-SOCIALISM? (Fully Automated Luxury Communism)

A Scenario for Cyber-Socialism

Could This Actually Work?

An Early Example: China’s Social Credit System

10. Smarter Ecosystems

HOW WILL ECOSYSTEMS CHANGE WITH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY?

SUPERMINDS HAVE WILLS OF THEIR OWN (Free Will)

MOST SUPERMINDS HAVE A GOAL OF INCREASING THEIR OWN SURVIVAL OR REPRODUCTION

WHO’S IN CONTROL HERE?

11. Which Superminds Are Best for Which Decisions?

HOW CAN WE COMPARE SUPERMINDS?

COMPARING COSTS OF GROUP DECISION MAKING

Comparing Ecosystems and Democracies

Comparing Hierarchies, Markets, and Communities (TIMN)

When Do Markets Have a Lower Decision-Making Cost Than Hierarchies?

When Do Markets Have a Higher Decision-Making Cost Than Hierarchies?

Comparing Markets to Communities

COMPARING BENEFITS OF GROUP DECISION MAKING

Basic Benefits of Cooperation

Benefits of Bigness

COMPARING DISTRIBUTION OF BENEFITS

SUMMARY

EXPLAINING THE SUPERMIND ECOSYSTEM IN HUNTING-AND-GATHERING SOCIETIES

EXPLAINING TODAY’S SUPERMIND ECOSYSTEM

Why Are Greater Economies of Scale Available Now?

Why Are Markets a Good Way of Organizing Very Large Groups with Lots of Decisions to Make?

Why Are There Hierarchical Firms in a Market Economy?

Why Are There Government Hierarchies in a Market Economy?

Why Are There Democracies in a Market Economy? (cf market socialism)

What Role Do Communities Have in a Market Economy?

HOW WILL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AFFECT THE BALANCE OF POWER AMONG TYPES OF SUPERMINDS?

Increasing the Size of Groups

Decreasing Costs of Group Decision Making

SUMMARY

12. Bigger Is (Often) Smarter

EXAMPLE: CLIMATE COLAB

Winning Ideas from Climate CoLab

THE BRUTE-FORCE EFFECT

Searching for Red Balloons

THE WISDOM-OF-CROWDS EFFECT

Limitations of the Wisdom of Crowds

SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE

UNUSUAL KNOWLEDGE

UNUSUAL ABILITIES

LIMITS OF SIZE

Comparing Occupy Wall Street and Wikipedia

13. How Can We Work Together in New Ways?

DIVIDING WORK IN NEW WAYS: HYPERSPECIALIZATION

Topcoder

Microtasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk

ASSIGNING TASKS TO PEOPLE IN NEW WAYS: SELF-SELECTION (Open Allocation)

Semiautomated Matching of Tasks to People

COORDINATING INTERDEPENDENCIES AMONG TASKS IN NEW WAYS

EXAMPLE: “CONTEST WEBS” IN CLIMATE COLAB12

Advantages of Contest Webs

Incentives for Collaboration

Using Contest Webs to Solve Other Problems

14. Smarter Sensing

HOW CAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY HELP?

Big Data

PRIVACY AND INFORMATION AS PROPERTY

CYBER-HUMAN SENSING

Neural Nets

A CYBER-HUMAN SYSTEM FOR SENSING POTENTIAL TERRORIST ATTACKS

Priming the System

Detecting Actual Threats

Entering Facts Automatically

Letting Humans and Machines Estimate the Same Probabilities

Could This Really Work?

15. Smarter Remembering

HOW CAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY HELP GROUPS REMEMBER?

INCREASING THE SIZE OF A GROUP’S WORKING MEMORY

REMEMBERING MILLIONS OF MEDICAL CASES

16. Smarter Learning

EXPLOITATION AND EXPLORATION

HOW CAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY HELP?

CYBER-HUMAN LEARNING LOOPS

Creating a Cyber-Human Learning Loop for Crime Solving

Cyber-Human Learning Loops in Medicine, Law, Accounting, and More

LEARNING FROM EXPERIMENTS

Adam the Robot Scientist

17. Corporate Strategic Planning

WHAT IS CORPORATE STRATEGIC PLANNING?

HOW HAS P&G DONE STRATEGIC PLANNING IN THE PAST? (P-and-G)

INVOLVING MORE PEOPLE IN GENERATING POSSIBILITIES (idea generation)

Who Can Participate?

SEMIAUTOMATED TOOLS TO HELP GENERATE MORE POSSIBILITIES

A Strategy Recombinator

INVOLVING MORE PEOPLE IN EVALUATING POSSIBILITIES

Involving Specialists and Outsiders

Using an Evaluation Funnel

Using Prediction Markets, Online Argumentation, and Voting

Recognizing Diamonds in the Rough

USING SEMIAUTOMATED TOOLS TO EVALUATE POSSIBILITIES

Spreadsheets, Simulations, and Bayesian Networks

Automating Rules from Experts

Using Machine Learning to Recognize Patterns

A CYBER-HUMAN STRATEGY MACHINE

18. Climate Change

REDUCING EMISSIONS

Community Norms

Hierarchical Government Regulations

Markets

Internalizing the Costs of Carbon Emissions

What Could Cause the US Government to Internalize Emissions Costs?

Are There Other Ways of Internalizing Emissions Costs?

Sensing, Remembering, and Learning

ADAPTING TO THE RESULTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Reducing Risks of Coastal Flooding

Anticipating and Responding to Coastal Floods

CREATING A NEW KIND OF GLOBAL COMMUNITY

19. Risks of Artificial Intelligence

WILL A ROBOT TAKE YOUR JOB?

People Will Do What Machines Can’t

People Will Do More of the Things That Machines Make Cheaper to Do

People Will Do Things Just Because We Want People to Do Them

What Happens During the Transition?

Who Will Pay?

What Can Governments Do?

WILL SUPERINTELLIGENT COMPUTERS TAKE OVER THE WORLD?

How Can We Deal with This Risk?

What Can We Do in the Meantime?

What Does This Leave Out?

20. Hello, Internet, Are You Awake?

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

CAN GROUPS BE CONSCIOUS?

IS APPLE CONSCIOUS?

First, let’s define the supermind called Apple as including all the employees of Apple, Inc., along with all the machines, buildings, and other resources the employees use to do their work. Is this group conscious according to the definitions above?

Awareness

Self-Awareness

Goal-Directed Behavior

Integrated Information

Experience

CAN OTHER TYPES OF SUPERMINDS BE CONSCIOUS?

CAN WE MEASURE GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS?

What Is Integrated Information?

Can We Measure the Integrated Information of a Group?

21. The Global Mind (Global Brain)

HOW WILL THE GLOBAL MIND CHANGE WITH NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES?

DOES THE GLOBAL MIND REALLY EXIST?

WHAT DOES THE GLOBAL MIND WANT?

WHAT WOULD A WISE GLOBAL MIND WANT?

The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number

Serving a Purpose Larger Than Yourself

The Sufi teacher Idries Shah, quoting another Sufi teacher, says, “What we have to do is detach from both intellect and emotion… [T]here is a level below this, which is a single, small, but vital one… This true intellect is the organ of comprehension, existing in every human being.”1

WILL WE EVER REALLY UNDERSTAND THE GLOBAL MIND?