Superminds by Thomas Malone, 2018

1. Supermindsby 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 1Would 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 1Would 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 1Would 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 1Would 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 1Would 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 2Can 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 30-60 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 2Can 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 2Can 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 2Can 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 2Can a group take an intelligence test? • Social perceptiveness measured by a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes

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

14. Superminds – Part I, Chap 2Can 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 3How 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 3How will people work with computers? • Roles computers play relative to humans 1 Tools – majority are for communication • Word processor, e-mail, 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 3How 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 3How will people work with computers? Mechanical Turk directed article creation

19. Superminds – Part II, Chap 3How 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 3How 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 4How 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 4How 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 4How 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 4How 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 4How 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 4How 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 5How 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 5How 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 5How can people and computers be more intelligent? • What are the cognitive processes needed in an intelligent system?

30. Superminds – Part II, Chap 5How 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