About the author About the title  Order Contact the author Table of contents Excerpt

Advancing technology and globalization are feeding the growth of organizations of unprecedented size, power, and superiority. These hyper-beings radically alter the environment for businesses, governments, militaries, workers and citizens. Cunning competitors, these vast human-machine systems are becoming the Earth’s dominant new species.

A hyper-being can combine thousands of human brains and bodies with millions of computer-based brains and robotic effectors into vast networks that monitor and coordinate activities at all scales, everywhere, around the clock. These superior beings will dominate large niches indeed. We humans have few attractive options. We can find a role functioning within them or find a tiny niche for ourselves that’s outside their ecosystem. The only prudent thing for us to do is to race into the future, seeking a rewarding position, as a valued supplier of needed capabilities aboard one of the biggest, fiercest, most dominant creatures ever imagined: a 21st-century hyper-being.

Hyper-beings evolve really fast. Because they compete in a world where bits control reality, natural selection speeds their rise to dominant positions. Data and memes travel at the speed of light. Of all creatures, hyper-beings process these bits most rapidly and effectively, Bits today largely control money, power, and influence. Capital moves at the speed of light, from one account to another, from one nation to another, chasing the highest possible returns. Those highest returns increasingly result from efficient thought and agile configuration, the province of hyper-beings.

This book explains how hyper-beings use a superior thinking process, called efficient thought, to achieve competitive supremacy. Practitioners of efficient thought continuously employ and improve their superior knowledge, which they use for modeling how things work, how to plan effective missions, and how to analyze results. Hyper-beings are assembled as distributed intelligent systems recursively composed of collaborative networking modules each embedding efficient thought.