1. Superminds by Thomas Malone, 2018
Summary of Book – Parts 1 & 2
by Charles Tappert and Tilak Agerwala
The information presented here, although greatly condensed,
comes almost entirely from the course textbook.

2. Superminds – Book Parts
1 What are the superminds?
2 How can computers help make superminds smarter?
3 How can superminds make smarter decisions?
4 How can superminds create more intelligibility?
5 How else can superminds think more intelligently?
6 How can superminds help solve our problems?
7 Where are we headed?

3. Superminds – Part I, Chap 1 Would you recognize a supermind?
A supermind is a group of individuals acting together in ways that seem intelligent
Collective intelligence is the result of groups of individuals acting together in ways that seem intelligent
This is a property of a supermind

4. Superminds – Part I, Chap 1 Would you recognize a supermind?
Group – extends to many kinds of groups
Such as people walking on the sidewalk
Of individuals – including resources the minds control
For example: employees, tables, chairs, etc. at Starbucks
Acting together – their activities must be connected
Such as two baristas working together at Starbucks to fill the customer orders
In ways that seem intelligent – doing something that seems intelligent to an observer
Such as the two baristas working together at Starbucks

5. Superminds – Part I, Chap 1 Would you recognize a supermind?
What is intelligence? Not easy to define
Encyclopedia Britannica: the ability to adapt effectively to the environment
Group of 52 Psychologists: the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience

6. Superminds – Part I, Chap 1 Would you recognize a supermind?
This book defines two types of intelligence
Specialized intelligence: the ability to achieve specific goals effectively in a given environment
General intelligence: the ability to achieve a wide range of different goals effectively in different environments
This definition is similar to the one from psychologists
And is measured by intelligence tests

7. Superminds – Part I, Chap 1 Would you recognize a supermind?
A supermind is a group of individuals acting together in ways that seem intelligent
With practice we can learn to see the four components, and to artfully apply the concepts of superminds and collective intelligence to get useful insights about the real world

8. Superminds – Part I, Chap 2 Can a group take an intelligence test?
Measuring individual intelligence
Intelligence tests – IQ tests
Perhaps the most important achievement in the field of psychology in the 20th century
Predicts percent of variation on different tasks
Most accurate single predictor of job success, more accurate than reference checking, interviews, etc.
SATs and similar educational tests correlate highly with intelligence tests
(Intelligent people also live longer)

9. Superminds – Part I, Chap 2 Can a group take an intelligence test?
Measuring group intelligence
To predict how well a group will perform on a wide range of different tasks
Malone and his people developed group tests
Such tests had not existed previously
Used the McGrath framework for classifying group tasks
Generating something new – new uses for a brick
Choosing from among specified alternatives – solve puzzles
Negotiating – plan a shopping trip with various constraints
Executing – type long passage into a shared online text editor

10. Superminds – Part I, Chap 2 Can a group take an intelligence test?
Does the collective intelligence test work?
Found that groups are like individuals in that there is a single statistical factor for a group
Predicts about 45% of variation on different tasks
Predicts performance on more complex tasks
Much better than either the average or the maximum individual intelligence of the group members

11. Superminds – Part I, Chap 2 Can a group take an intelligence test?
What makes a group smart?
Although the average and the maximum individual intelligence of the group members was correlated with the group’s collective intelligence
Three more important factors
Social perceptiveness, a measure of social intelligence
Degree to which group members contributed equally
Proportion of women in the group

12. Superminds – Part I, Chap 2 Can a group take an intelligence test?
Social perceptiveness measured by a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes

13. Superminds – Part I, Chap 2 Can a group take an intelligence test?
Proportion of women in the group

14. Superminds – Part I, Chap 2 Can a group take an intelligence test?
Social intelligence is the key to collective intelligence
Of the three factors, the only statistically significant one was social perceptiveness, which appears to be the underlying mechanism at work for the other two factors
And apparently these social skills are important in the online world as well as in the face-to-face world

15. Superminds – Part II, Chap 3 How will people work with computers?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is perhaps the future of computing
And Google’s search engine is almost certainly the most widely used example of AI today
Over 2.3 million searches per second
But it’s not like AI robots from science fiction
More like a tool or assistant, doesn’t act human, and doesn’t communicate in sentences like humans

16. Superminds – Part II, Chap 3 How will people work with computers?
Roles computers play relative to humans
1 Tools – majority are for communication
Word processor, , texting, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
2 Assistants – can work without direct attention (fine line between tools and assistants)
Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, IBM’s Watson, self-driving cars when available

17. Superminds – Part II, Chap 3 How will people work with computers?
Roles computers play relative to humans
3 Peers – machines act as peers to humans
A program might be an assistant to one human but a peer to others – for example, self-driving car
Wikipedia has bots that automatically perform certain kinds of edits, referring others to humans
4 Managers – delegate tasks, give directions, evaluate work, coordinate the efforts of others
Mechanical Turk directs human workers called Turkers

18. Superminds – Part II, Chap 3 How will people work with computers?
Mechanical Turk directed article creation

19. Superminds – Part II, Chap 3 How will people work with computers?
What will AI machines look like?
Most are and will be disembodied (basically invisible) intelligences that don’t look like anything
Google search engine, Siri, Alexa, etc.
Some AI will have human form to serve in physical environments designed for humans
Serve you meals, make your bed, do tasks in your house
AI sex robots (this follows a long history of IT apps)

20. Superminds – Part II, Chap 3 How will people work with computers?
How will we communicate with computers?
The same way we communicate with humans
Machines get better with human language – Siri, Alexa
But we will also use other ways
Nonverbal interaction
For example, machines create rich visual images
Ultimate communication will be a mind-meld
For example, silicon chips embedded into the human brain
When human groups include computers, they need people and computers to work well together

21. Superminds – Part II, Chap 4 How much AGI will computers have?
The book defines AI as “intelligence exhibited by machines” in order to use the definitions of intelligence from chapter 1
Specialized AI: the ability to achieve specific goals effectively in a given environment
General AI: the ability to achieve a wide range of different goals effectively in different environments
The AI today is all very specialized

22. Superminds – Part II, Chap 4 How much AGI will computers have?
When will machines have general intelligence?
Some argue that this will never happen
AI researchers say about 15 to 25 years, but they have been saying this for the last 60+ years
Malone thinks this will happen someday, but it may take quite a few decades

23. Superminds – Part II, Chap 4 How much AGI will computers have?
What’s so hard about programming computers?
Requires people to write code, not an easy task
For example, Google estimates there are roughly 2 billion lines of high-level-language code in the software they use

24. Superminds – Part II, Chap 4 How much AGI will computers have?
What paths might lead to general AI?
1. Commonsense knowledge
Humans learn this kind of knowledge as children
Millions of facts about our world
The Cyc project tries to program all these facts
2. Big data
Big data might provide these millions of facts
E.g., Google Translate, using UN documents translated into many languages, translates basically by lookup

25. Superminds – Part II, Chap 4 How much AGI will computers have?
What paths might lead to general AI?
3. Machine learning (unsupervised learning)
Give the machine many examples and let it learn
This is how humans learn
4. Neuromorphic computing
Create machines that have billions of processors working in parallel, like human brains have billions of neurons
5. Quantum computing (not mentioned in book)

26. Superminds – Part II, Chap 4 How much AGI will computers have?
How can AI help make groups smarter?
Long before general AI, we can create collectively intelligent systems that include both human and machine agents
Humans can supply the general intelligence
Machines can supply the knowledge and the other specialized capabilities that people don’t have
This is the main focus of the rest of the book

27. Superminds – Part II, Chap 5 How can people and computers be more intelligent?
Perfect collective intelligence
To get insight into how to make groups more intelligent, consider a perfectively intelligent group
Computers can play tic-tac-toe perfectly and remember vast amounts of information
But for most real problems there are no perfect answers

28. Superminds – Part II, Chap 5 How can people and computers be more intelligent?
A perfectly intelligent company
Consider a cyber-human system that is perfectly intelligent given the resources it has
It is not omniscient or omnipotent, but based solely on the information it has access to, it makes perfectly intelligent use of all this knowledge
Of course, no real company can be this smart
In the rest of this book, we’ll see how superminds might use new technologies to become smarter

29. Superminds – Part II, Chap 5 How can people and computers be more intelligent?
What are the cognitive processes needed in an intelligent system?

30. Superminds – Part II, Chap 5 How can people and computers be more intelligent?
What are the cognitive processes needed in an intelligent system?
Working backward from the action:
Decide what action to take
Create possibilities for several courses of action
Sense the surrounding world
Remember things from the past
Learn from experience
These are building blocks of intelligent behavior