About the Author

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management, a professor of information technology, and a professor of work and organizational studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and was one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century." Malone is the author of The Future of Work and more than 100 articles, research papers, and book chapters. He has also been a cofounder of four software companies; an inventor on 11 patents; and a co-editor of four books.

Reviews

"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."--Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots

"A book rich in speculation about how collective thinking might solve big problems such as climate change; of interests to fans of Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and other big-picture thinkers."--Kirkus Reviews

"A remarkable journey into the basic structures -- markets, hierarchies, democracies and more -- that have advanced civilization throughout history and now bring us to a turning point where the complex problems facing humanity can be addressed by people and computers working together in totally new ways. A must read."
--Amy Edmondson, professor, Harvard Business School, and author of Building the Future

"Deeply explores the power of information technology to enable truly new forms of human organization. Highly recommended."--Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder

"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."--Joi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab, and author of Whiplash

"Humans plus computers and networks have enormous potential. How can such wee creatures as ourselves take advantage of this potential? Malone addresses this question in a concrete way, laying the foundation for a new discipline: the systems engineering of superminds."--Vernor Vinge, Hugo Award-winning science fiction author, and originator of the "technological singularity" concept.

"In this fascinating book, Tom Malone introduces 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."
--Anne Marie-Slaughter, CEO of New America and author of Unfinished Business

"In this terrific, well-researched, and highly readable book, Tom Malone explores provocatively and practically the opportunities and challenges that superminds will help us address in business and society. Leaders who care about harnessing the power of human minds in a world enabled by digital technologies must read this book."--James Manyika, Chairman, McKinsey Global Institute

"Malone takes us on an intentional journey into thinking about thought, intelligence, reasoning, and consciousness. He sees these notions in extremely broad terms that have changed my views of what it means to 'think.'"--Vint Cerf, VP, Google, and one of the "fathers of the Internet"

"The story of human civilization has fundamentally been the story of coordination: in families, tribes, markets, nations. The challenge we now face is learning how to collaborate at an unprecedented scale, with both human and nonhuman partners alike -- be they institutions, decentralized networks or intelligent machines. Superminds opens a window into what may be the defining question of the coming century."--Brian Christian, author of Algorithms to Live By

"The wonderful essence of Tom Malone's book is to imagine how people and computers will interact on a massive scale to create intelligent systems. And by imagining them in advance, we have some hope of nudging them in a positive direction."--Esther Dyson, executive founder of Way to Wellville and author of Release 2.1

"Tom Malone puts worries about artificial intelligence in perspective, explaining why AI works best when combined with humans in superminds. What makes a supermind more or less intelligent is just one of many surprises in this fascinating book."--Patrick Winston, former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and author of Artificial Intelligence