A book rich in speculation about how collective thinking might solve big problems such as climate change; of interests to...
Forget artificial intelligence. Instead, think collective intelligence, putting “AI in combination with humans who provide whatever skills and general intelligence the machines don’t yet have themselves.”
It’s not so much that the machines are going to supplant us, writes Malone (Management/MIT; The Future of Work, 2004), the director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. It’s that machines aren’t quite capable—yet—of thinking in ways that humans do, just as machines can perform calculations that it would take generations of human thinkers to complete. Add IT to human brainpower, and you’ve got a supermind—with the operative notion being that the machines are aids to a collective of human thinkers who illustrate, in case after case, that “almost all of our important problems are solved by groups of people, rather than by individuals alone.” While individual intelligence is important—and, writes Malone, intelligence tests are the best predictors of success in a broad range of human endeavors—it’s the pulling together that’s significant. Moreover, while smart people are certainly a desideratum, what counts more in powerful collective intelligence is “social perceptiveness,” a matter in which women typically score higher than men. The author enumerates the cognitive processes that go into an intelligent system, including, importantly, the ability to learn from experience, which is perhaps not as widespread a talent as we might wish. That learning, in turn, may inspire platform revolutions. After all, Malone suggests, now that we’re used to the ease of buying books and toothpaste online, why shouldn’t we be able to shop for spinal surgery in the same way, so that “if consumers don’t get what they want from their current doctors’ offices, they’re likely to go to other superminds in the market for medical services.” The possibilities are endless.
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.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-34913-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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