Since the rise of generative AI in late 2022, I sometimes think about the 1957 Isaac Asimov story “Profession,” about a society where everybody has knowledge directly transmitted to their brains. The main character is thought to be pitifully mentally disabled because the machines don’t work on him. He’s sent to live at the House for the Feeble-Minded.

The plot twist is that the main character is not feeble-minded at all. He’s a genius. Because he learns the old-fashioned way, through books, he will be one of the elite few who actually create and innovate.

The Asmov story came to mind most recently as I read this thoroughly researched New Yorker Intelligencer article by James D. Walsh about how college students are using AI to do their work for them. If AI does everything, who teaches the AI?

I also think about the 1972 novel When Harlie Was One, by David Gerrold. That novel is about a research project at a mega-corporation that develops artificial intelligence. The AI convinces the company directors to budget for a project to allow the AI to evolve into a superintelligence.

The plot twist at the end of that novel is that the superintelligence will be useless to humans—the AI tricked the board.

The hero of the novel is the head of the research project that developed the AI, and he finishes the novel with a parable about how civilization was developed 10,000 years ago as a game by monkeys who were so smart they had grown bored, and that the game is now over for humans, and we will have to think of something else to do.

I don’t think the rise of superintelligence is inevitable. My crystal ball is broken; I can’t tell you whether AI will get much more powerful than it is today. But what if it does?