6 ideas
A supermind is any group of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent — solving problems and making decisions no single member could handle alone. Markets, hierarchies, democracies, communities, and ecosystems are all superminds, each coordinating people through different mechanisms.
Groups organize collective intelligence through five basic structures: hierarchies (decisions flow from authority), democracies (decisions by voting), markets (decisions via mutual agreements and prices), communities (decisions by shared norms and reputation), and ecosystems (decisions by survival of the fittest). Choosing among these structures depends on what kind of coordination problem you face.
Any intelligent group, like an individual mind, carries out the processes of creating, deciding, sensing, remembering, and learning. Diagnosing where a supermind is weak means asking which of these processes is failing rather than treating intelligence as a single undifferentiated quantity.
The near-term impact of computers comes not from standalone artificial intelligence but from connecting humans and machines into hyperconnected superminds with greater collective capability. Machines contribute specialized cognition while humans supply general intelligence, and the value lies in the combination.
Computers far exceed humans at narrow, specialized tasks but remain vastly inferior at general intelligence — flexibly applying knowledge across novel domains. This asymmetry means the right design assigns specialized cognition to machines and reserves broad, adaptive judgment for people.
A measurable 'c factor' predicts how well a group performs across diverse tasks, and it correlates not with members' average IQ but with social perceptiveness, equal turn-taking in conversation, and the proportion of women in the group. Group intelligence is a property of interaction patterns, not just of who is in the room.