Bostrom identifies parallel work with independently verifiable subproblems as a favorable setting for collective intelligence; this supplies a task-design criterion, not evidence that an investment collective outperforms.

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Collective intelligence excels at solving problems that can be readily broken into parts such that solutions to sub-problems can be pursued in parallel and verified independently. Tasks like building a space shuttle or operating a hamburger franchise offer myriad opportunities for division of labor: different engineers work on different components of the spacecraft; different staffs operate different restaurants. In academia, the rigid division of researchers, students, journals, grants, and prizes into separate self-contained disciplines—though unconducive to the type of work represented by this book—might (only in a conciliatory and mellow frame of mind) be viewed as a necessary accommodation to the practicalities of allowing large numbers of diversely motivated individuals and teams to contribute to the growth of human knowledge while working relatively independently, each plowing their own furrow. <span id="page-72-2"></span>A system's collective intelligence could be enhanced by expanding the number or the quality of its constituent intellects, or by improving the quality of their organization. [⁸](#page-314-4) To obtain a collective *superintelligence* from any present-day collective intelligence would require a very great degree of enhancement. The resulting system would need to be capable of vastly outperforming any current