Stephen Downes

This is an overview of Thomas Malone's book Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together. Malone clearly builds on concepts like collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds, defining a supermind as "a group of individuals acting in ways that seem intelligent."  The interesting twist here is that the individuals in question might be both humans and computers. The machines undertake tasks requiring 'specialized intelligence' while humans undertake tasks requiring 'general intelligence'. "For the foreseeable future, therefore, there is another way of using IT that will be even more important than just creating better AI: creating groups of people and computers that, together, are far more collectively intelligent than was ever possible before," writes Malone.