Superminds

Is Apple conscious?Could a cyber–human system sense a potential terrorist attack?Or make diagnosing a rare and little-known disease routine?Computers are not replacing us: they are enhancing us. Different intelligences are joining together to do things we thought were impossible.Whether it’s devising innovations to tackle climate change, helping job seekers and employers find one another, or identifying the outbreak of a serious disease, groups of humans and machines are already working together to solve all sorts of problems. And they will do a lot more.The future will be like another world – a place where we’ll think differently. In many ways, we are already there.

‘Malone does a terrific job of explaining how collective intelligence has evolved.’, ‘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!’, ‘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.’, ‘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.’, ‘Thomas Malone was a decade ahead of most of the rest of us in thinking about the future of work. Now – in this fascinating book – he has done it again, looking ahead to a hyper-connected 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.’

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.