There has been much discussion about adding truth dimensions to search engines, so that Google’s search results would display how reliable or verifiable information is, rather than only reflecting how many times content is linked or clicked.29 A different way of organising knowledge is always to combine the answer with a suggestion, steer or

Of course, and again as in the arts, we need the pull of demand. As I showed in Chapters 7 and 8, ideas can take many paths to reality: top down through persuading a handful of leaders, bottom up pushed by social movements, or through the middle. The crucial point is that supply needs to be met by demand, and this is where engaging the potential

Social imagination requires a comparable mix to create, share and criticise designs for the future: imaginative individuals, funds, critics and audiences. Just as the arts thrive best with intensive feedback, so do we need an equivalent for social imagination that can judge new ideas by their plausibility, novelty and ambition.

how might we think about it, and what might a leap in collective intelligence, and ultimately in collective wisdom, look like?

Keynes underestimated the many roles that work plays in our lives beyond our economic needs, but the question he raised was the right one: how will we organise liberated time in ways that are meaningful and satisfying? Will we see ever more refined subcultures of hedonism,

Indeed, as a rule, the imagined places that were most sealed off from the world had the least influence (and the vast majority of utopian communes quickly collapsed). Those that were more interlinked with the world found it easier to evolve, adapt and influence by way of example.

If these arguments are right, then a wiser society is one where such methods and habits are ubiquitous, rather than one ruled by a council of elders. They also point to a more fundamental observation—that what really makes societies tick, now and in the future, is not just the surface facts of GDP, institutions or law, though these are important.

For society’s imagineers, there are not so many obvious tools, the raw materials being life and society themselves; and there are few academies or colleges that teach the craft of change.

Diversity in the sense of negatively correlated predictions produces better outcomes; in other words, the diversity has to be relevant, generating different viewpoints. Sophistication means that there needs to be some deep knowledge in the group, though without diversity this leads to errors. Integration means, as above, abilities to make sense of