Superminds

How Hyperconnectivity is Changing the Way We Solve Problems

Thomas W. Malone

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781786074713
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

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.

Part I

What Are Superminds?

CHAPTER 1

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

When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, in 1776, he said that buyers and sellers in a market who do what’s best for themselves are often “led by [the] invisible hand” of the market to also do what’s best for society. For instance, if you can make more profit for yourself by selling mustard ice cream instead of mocha from your ice cream truck, then that’s also the way your business can contribute more economic value to society.¹

Of course, there are certainly situations where maximizing your own profit isn’t what’s best for society. But Smith’s profound realization was that the human interactions in a market can often lead to good overall outcomes that none of the individuals themselves are trying to achieve. Even if you are just selling mustard ice cream to make more money for yourself, you are also—unwittingly—helping to use all the milk, sugar, human labor, and other resources of your whole society in a way that makes more people happy. Smith called this almost mystical property of markets their “invisible hand.”

But markets don’t just have invisible hands; they are invisible minds. In fact, they’re superminds. Superminds are all around us all the time, but to see them, you have to know how to look. Some superminds, like companies, are usually pretty easy to see. Others, like ecosystems, are much harder.

I sometimes play a little game with myself: How many superminds can I see while walking down the street? When I walk out of my MIT office building and turn left, toward Kendall Square, here are some of the things I might see: a construction crew, a bank, stores and restaurants, and a crowded sidewalk full of pedestrians who don’t run into each other.

These are all superminds, but to see them as such, we need to look in a very particular way. And to look in that way, we need a definition of superminds. Here’s the one we’ll use throughout this book:

Supermind—a group of individuals acting together in ways that seem intelligent.

We can also define collective intelligence as a property that any supermind has:²

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

Every word of the definition of supermind is important, so let’s take the definition apart, piece by piece.

A Group ...

To see a supermind, we have to first identify a group. That’s often easy. For instance, the construction crew remodeling a building near my office is clearly a group of people. So are the employees in the restaurant where I sometimes buy turkey sandwiches.

Some groups aren’t quite so obvious. For instance, the people walking on the sidewalk aren’t a group you would ordinarily think much about, but when they do their (mostly) unconscious dance to avoid running into each other, they become, for a fleeting moment, a kind of supermind.

Of Individuals ...

Our definition says that the parts of a supermind are “individuals,” but it doesn’t specify exactly what kind of individuals. That means the individual parts of a supermind can be very small or very large, and they can include not just minds but also bodies and other resources the minds control.

For instance, we could say that my neighborhood Starbucks coffee shop is a supermind that includes all the individual employees in the shop as well as the tables, chairs, coffeemakers, and coffee beans. Alternatively, we could say that the whole coffee shop itself is an individual that is part of an even larger supermind: the market that includes all the vendors competing to sell coffee in my neighborhood. Or, at a lower level, we could say that a single Starbucks barista is a kind of supermind whose individual parts include all the neurons in the barista’s brain—yes, each person’s mind is a supermind on its own.

Acting Together ...

So are all groups of individuals superminds? Not necessarily. First, a group is a supermind only if its individuals are acting in some way. For instance, you probably wouldn’t say that a group of four empty coffee cups just lying on the ground is a supermind.

But just because a group is acting doesn’t mean it’s a supermind, either; the individuals must be acting together. In other words, their activities must be connected in some way. Two unrelated people in two different cities, each groggily making coffee on the same morning, are probably not a supermind. But two Starbucks baristas working together to fill all the customer orders in a single shop would be.

Now, here’s an important point: even though the individuals’ actions need to be connected, the individuals in a supermind do not need to cooperate with each other or have the same goals. A company called InnoCentive, for instance, has online contests where scientists and technologists compete to solve difficult problems, like how to synthesize a particular chemical compound. But even though the problem solvers are competing with each other—not cooperating—their actions are connected because they are all working on the same problem.

In Ways That Seem Intelligent

Finally, it’s not enough just to have a group of individuals performing connected actions. To be a supermind, the group also has to be doing something that seems intelligent. You may be surprised to see the word seem in this definition because it sounds a little wishy-washy. But it is critical because there is an important sense in which superminds—like beauty—exist only in the eye of the beholder.

In fact, all the elements of a supermind—not just intelligence but also individuals, groups, actions, and connections—have to be identified by an observer.³ And different observers can analyze the same situation in different ways. For instance, if you say that each Starbucks shop is itself a supermind, and I say that each one is part of a larger supermind, we can both be right, but we will get different insights about the situation.

The role of the observer is especially critical in judging intelligence, because this is always, to some degree, a subjective judgment. For instance, whether you think an entity is intelligent depends, crucially, on what goals you think the entity is trying to achieve. When students take multiple-choice intelligence tests, we assume they are trying to give the answers the test designers consider correct. But I can easily imagine a girl I knew in high school, who was very smart—and very rebellious—taking such a test and deciding to fill in the circles on the multiple-choice answer sheet in the pattern of a pretty flower. If she did that, the usual scoring method for the test wouldn’t measure her high intelligence at all!

In order to assess an entity’s intelligence, then, an observer always has to make assumptions about the entity’s goals. And when evaluating a group’s intelligence, it is often useful to consider overall goals for the group that are important to the observer, even if none of the individuals in the group has those goals.

For instance, each of the ice cream truck owners in a city has a different goal: most of them probably want to make as much money as possible for themselves and to have fewer permits issued to their competitors. But if your job for the city’s parks department includes determining how many ice cream truck permits to issue for the city parks, you might want to survey park visitors about whether they feel there is enough good-tasting ice cream available at reasonable prices. These surveys would be one way of evaluating the overall intelligence of the supermind that includes all the ice cream trucks in the park.

Finally, it’s important to note that we can consider a group a supermind if we observe the group trying to do something intelligent, even if it isn’t succeeding. For instance, you might well consider a software start-up company a supermind, even if, after all the group’s intelligent efforts, its product fails and the company goes out of business.

WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?

But what do we mean by intelligence in the first place? This term is a notoriously slippery one, and different people have defined it in many different ways.⁴ For example, the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines it as “the ability to adapt effectively to the environment.” The cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner defines it as “the ability to solve problems, or to create products, that are valued within one or more cultural settings.” And a group of 52 leading psychologists summarized the mainstream view within the field like this:

Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do.⁵

For our purposes in this book, we will define two kinds of intelligence, each of which is useful for different purposes. The first kind is specialized intelligence:

Specialized intelligence—the ability to achieve specific goals effectively in a given environment.

This definition is equivalent to the definitions above from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Howard Gardner. Basically, it means that an intelligent entity will do whatever is most likely to help it achieve its goals, based on everything it knows. Stated even more simply, specialized intelligence is just “effectiveness” at achieving specific goals. In this sense, then, specialized collective intelligence is just “group effectiveness,” and a supermind is an effective group.

Our second kind of intelligence is more broadly useful and often more interesting:

General intelligence—the ability to achieve a wide range of different goals effectively in different environments.

This definition is similar to the definition above from the group of 52 psychologists, and this is the kind of intelligence that intelligence tests measure. Intelligence tests don’t just measure your ability to do a few specific tasks effectively. The tasks on these tests are carefully selected so that they predict your ability to do a very wide range of other tasks beyond those you’re being specifically tested on.

For instance, people who get high scores on intelligence tests are—on average—better than others at learning to read, write, do arithmetic, and solve many other kinds of problems. Of course, it’s quite possible for someone who has been doing a specific task for a long time—like repairing Honda cars—to be much better at that task than someone who is more intelligent but has never opened the hood of a Honda. But in general, people who are more intelligent are better at learning new things quickly and adapting rapidly to new environments.

We’ll see much more about this definition in the next chapter, but for now the key point is that the definition of general intelligence requires an intelligent actor to be not just good at a specific kind of task but also good at learning how to do a wide range of tasks. In short, this definition of intelligence means roughly the same thing as “versatility” or “adaptability.” In this sense, then, general collective intelligence means “group versatility” or “group adaptability.”

The difference between specialized intelligence and general intelligence helps clarify the difference between the abilities of today’s computers and the abilities of people. Some of today’s artificially intelligent computers are far smarter than people in terms of specialized intelligence. For instance, they can perform specific tasks, like playing chess or Jeopardy, better than humans. But no matter how good they are at these specific tasks, none of today’s computers is anywhere close to having the level of general intelligence that any normal human five-year-old does. No single computer today, for example, can converse sensibly about the vast number of topics an ordinary five-year-old can, not to mention the fact that the same child can also walk, pick up weirdly shaped objects, and recognize when people are happy, sad, or angry.

So as I walk down the street near my office—or anywhere else—there are lots of superminds to be seen. To recognize them, I need to identify four things: (1) a group of individuals, (2) some actio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. What Are Superminds?
• Part II. How Can Computers Help Make Superminds Smar ter?
• Part III. How Can Superminds Make Smar ter Decisions?
• Part IV. How Can Superminds Create More Intelligently?
• Part V. How Else Can Superminds Think More Intelligently?
• Part VI. How Can Superminds Help Solve Our Problems?
• Part VII. Where Are We Headed?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright