Название: Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
Автор: Thomas W. Malone
Издательство: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN: 0316349135
Год: 2018
Страниц: 384
Язык: английский
Формат: epub, pdf (conv)
Размер: 10.0 MB

Supermind is an English word that means “a powerful combination of many individual minds.” This book is the story of superminds on our planet. We’ll see that the history of humanity is largely the history of human superminds, of how humans in groups—like hierarchies, communities, markets, and democracies—accomplished things that individual humans could never have done alone.
More important, we’ll see how crucial computers will be for the superminds in our future. For a long time, the most important contribution of computers won’t be artificial intelligence; it will be hyperconnectivity—connecting human minds to each other in new ways and at unprecedented scales. But over time, computers will also do more and more of the complex kinds of thinking that only humans do today.

This book is not primarily about how computers will do things people used to do. It’s about how people and computers together will do things that were never possible before. It’s about how human-computer superminds will be smarter than anything our world has ever seen. And it’s about how we can use these new kinds of collective intelligence to help solve some of our most important problems in business, government, and many other parts of society.

A related approach to making computers more intelligent is to focus on developing ways for computers to learn. With this approach, instead of having human programmers write very detailed rules telling computers how to do every little thing they need to do, the programmers just write general rules that tell computers how to learn things, then let the computers figure out how to do everything else based on their own experience. This promising approach is called machine learning, and it is inspired by how humans learn. Humans are born with the ability to learn built into their brains, and they learn specific abilities without anyone ever “programming” them in the detailed way today’s computers need.

Still another intriguing approach to creating more intelligent computers is to create new kinds of computer hardware that more closely resemble the structure of a human brain (Neuromorphic Computing). The Little Man Computer represents digital computers that do only one instruction at a time, and until recently, almost all widely used computers were designed in this way. In the last few years, however, an increasing number of computers are built with multicore processors, where the equivalent of several little men are working in parallel in the same computer.