On 14 May 2026, Émile Servan-Schreiber announced that his book Supercollective Intelligence: How collective intelligence and prediction markets make companies, governments, and everyone smarter is available in English on Amazon. The Amazon listing gives a paperback of 151 pages, published by Défirama on 11 May 2026.
The book first appeared in France in 2018 as Supercollectif : la nouvelle puissance de nos intelligences, published by Fayard. Servan-Schreiber, a co-founder of Hypermind and the founder of The Forecasting Machine, points out that this was four years before ChatGPT reached the public in November 2022, and six years before prediction markets such as Polymarket drew wide attention during the 2024 US presidential election.
An argument that has aged well, by the author’s account
Servan-Schreiber wrote that neither development invalidates the book, and that both support two of its central points.
- Prediction markets. Chapters 5 to 7 make the case for prediction markets in business and government. When he wrote them, he says, the idea was still confined to a small circle of academics and pioneers. Today prediction markets are a regular topic and source in the mainstream media, and he hopes that attention will help scale the uses the book describes.
- Intelligence is collective. He attributes the leap in AI performance to large language models aggregating, through machine learning, the knowledge and narratives that people have posted online. He reads this as evidence for his thesis that all intelligence is collective. At the end of chapter 4, he notes, he had written that a single superhuman AI in which collective-intelligence principles play no important role would be enough to refute that conclusion.
Looking ahead, he sees the next challenge as organising the most efficient and rewarding combinations of human and artificial intelligence. He rejects the idea that AI makes human intelligence obsolete, arguing that AI has no future without the diversity of insight that many human minds produce at scale.
What is in the book
A week later, on 20 May, Servan-Schreiber outlined the seven chapters:
- The Supercollective Challenge links social density to sudden accelerations in collective intelligence, from villages and cities to digital networks, and argues that collective intelligence only delivers when it is properly designed.
- Smart Groups treats groups as thinking entities with a measurable IQ that depends less on members’ individual IQs than on their emotional intelligence and the quality of their connections.
- Wise Crowds explains the wisdom of crowds and James Surowiecki’s recipe for avoiding groupthink: diversity of opinion, decentralised sources, independent minds and objective aggregation.
- Intelligence Is Collective proposes that the same recipe applies to intelligence in general, whether it is drawn from people, neurons or data.
- Prediction Markets reviews twenty years of research and practice, which he says show markets outperforming opinion polls, experts and data models, and notes the interest of US intelligence agencies.
- Smarter Business shows uses inside companies: monitoring strategic projects, forecasting sales, accelerating innovation, building buy-in and breaking deadlocks.
- Super Democracy argues that better governance needs better predictions, and asks how long it will take to have a “Ministry of Forecasting” that involves all citizens in a national prediction market.
From a free PDF to a printed edition
An English translation circulated before the paperback. On 30 January 2025, Servan-Schreiber gave a keynote lecture at the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry, published online as “Collective Intelligence: How Diversity Makes Everyone Smarter”. He closed it by offering free PDF downloads of the English version through the Publications section of the Hypermind website. That page now lists the 2026 book with a link to Amazon.
He thanked a long list of researchers and practitioners for inspiration, among them Robin Hanson, Scott Page, Thomas Malone, Anita Williams Woolley, Philip Tetlock, Pavel Atanasov, Jason Matheny, Justin Wolfers, David Pennock, David Rothschild and James Surowiecki.
