A week or two ago, I wrote a piece about collaborative content creation, aimed towards writing up an article about Steemit as the first publicly-accessible superintelligence. The idea is to have an informative post that acts as a marketing tool for this platform. However, I quickly noticed that it's actually just a small part of a larger, epic collaborative work after watching @andrarchy proposing a crowdsourced book about superintelligence (please check it out here by @paradise-paradox).

To build on top of his ideas, here are my thoughts on the subject matter.

Write a book that everybody wants to read

First off, a crowdsourced book made from the many contributions of 100,000 early adopters, a group of intelligent minds writing about superintelligence on a new kind of social technology.. is particularly poetic!

However, the word superintelligence itself isn't particularly attractive. It just doesn't sound like it will resonate with mainstream consciousness at this point in time, unless people are actively looking for that. So for now, I think a better question needs to be asked: What's a book that everybody wants to read?

This is the part where many of us have different ideas, and that's a good thing! There are certainly ideas that tend dominate others due to the nature of Zipf's Law, but that does not mean that other ideas are not valuable. The best kind of marketing are the ones that doesn't only have one particular message.

Remember, different strokes for different folks.

So from this point onward, we can either set off suggesting and working on the theme of the book that we think is best. Or we can collaborate with others. Personally, I would want to tie in philosophical stuff about information, intelligence, and how social technologies can help us surpass all the grand challenges faced by humanity.

I've taken the liberty to learn from Singularity University, so here are my proposals on book titles that I think could catch on in mainstream consciousness (I'm not an expert on catchy, marketable books, so help me out):-

• Global Grand Challenges & How To Solve Them Using A New Kind of Social Technology.
• Problem-solving 101: On Information, Perception, and Execution.
• Weapon of Mass Collaboration: Building the World's First Superintelligence.

I'd imagine that such a book to be available at all stores, with an epic list of Steemians that made such a book possible!

_{A collaboration between @opheliafu and @skapaneas - check it out here}

A proposal for the structure.

As for the general structure of the book, 90% should be non-Steemit related dissertations. It should be an impressive enough book that can stand on its own merits. With such a strong foundation, the final 10% of the book should then be entirely about Steem / Steemit, drawing from all the strong connections made in 90% of the crowdsourced book.

Here's a very brief general outline for the sections in such a book (please note that they're also a culmination of the work of others, including @andrarchy's and the many things I've researched about):-

• Understanding the Evolution of Information.
• Understanding the Singularity and its effects.
• Understanding the 12 Global Grand Challenges.
• Understanding Mental Suffering: On Information, Perception, and Execution.
• Human Beings As Problem Solvers.
• The Future of Work.
• An Exposition about Free-will and Determinism.
• The Importance of Love and Care.
• Supercomputer & superintelligence - what's the difference?
• Three Major Steps for Global Abundance.
• A New Kind of Social Platform.

That's what I can think of.. for now. Before ending this proposal post here, I've also written a short draft on Supercomputer & Superintelligence.

Supercomputer & superintelligence

Here's how I look at the situation: the Steem blockchain is a globally-managed supercomputer with all its algorithms, but the many human beings that interact on Steem gives rise to an emergent property, and that's superintelligence.

This is a particularly important point to make, because what about other social technologies? What about the likes of Facebook, Reddit, and Quora? Don't they give rise to this thing called superintelligence?

Here's a very distinct difference that sets Steemit apart. Steem is an entirely different beast compared to other social networks, simply because that it's powered by currency (which is closely related to the word electricity, an inherent element in brains, in intelligence). In a way, the realm of high-payouts on Steemit is a collective consciousness while the domain of low-payouts is part of a collective subconsciousness. Everything on this network is really part of the same whole, just that its wired differently like all the neuronal pathways found in brains.

Also, I believe that anything less impressive than 3-seconds transaction times with zero transaction fees would just stand in the way of human intelligence on a social platform. Can you imagine how quick a human brain will die if the interconnections in its complex structure is "non-instantaneous" and takes plenty of resources?

_{Note: Personally, I think most people relate superintelligence to advanced artificial intelligence. This has been discussed to death and is particularly boring (and quite dehumanising lol). Although I'll be first to admit that AIs and technologies in general do augment and improve our limited human capabilities, I think computing can no way be compared to the breadth of intelligence. Taken to the extremes, they're actually pretty much the same thing, except for the fact that intelligence is forged by social experience. In any case, I just think that going for superintelligence as networked human intelligence is a much better direction.}

Closing and call to action

So that's it - my proposal for @andrarchy's idea for a crowdsourced book. I hope that such a book will do wonders in getting people on board! That said, please suggest and contribute anything to help out with the cause. I'm not sure how this will be built, but I guess that's up to our interactions here. Thank you for reading!

Please share, resteem, etc :)

_{Image sources 1 - 2
(Yup, Gerd Leonhard inspired plenty of things in me recently)}

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