I just saw Mike Judge’s brilliant 2006 satire “Idiocracy”. The premise is simple: A perfectly average man with an IQ of 100 is inadvertently kept in suspended animation for 500 years. When he awakes, he finds that due to unchecked human devolution (because stupid people have more babies than smart people), he is — by far — the smartest man in the world.
Although the film is wildly funny in places (not surprising, from the writer/director of “Office Space”), the total effect is quite depressing, and I mean that as praise. Every element of Judge’s imagined future dystopia is a pointed and very clever extrapolation from the cultural dumbing down that we see around us every day.
Watching this film, I was struck how confused the future humans became every time our hero spoke in complete grammatically correct sentences, or any time he used common sense reasoning in any non-trivial way. They literally could not follow either his words or his thoughts.
And it occurred to me that it would be interesting to transpose this entire idea — to posit an “average citizen” from a high IQ alternate world, and play out the same sort of scenario as he or she encounters our current reality. What would human speech be like that is perfectly correct, yet too intelligent for us to follow? What would be interesting examples of common sense reasoning beyond our own?
It would be fascinating to follow the story from the perspective of such a character, as our hero attempts to communicate with us by “dumbing down” speech into something we can understand, or negotiates everyday situations through dazzling reasoning, as though writing Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” in real time.
I know there have been attempts to do this in pop-culture, but I’ve never been satisfied, watching Mr. Spock, Q, the Talosians, Dr. Who, Professor X, Jarod, D.A.R.Y.L., or their various fictional cousins, that I was witnessing a believable representation of a truly higher functioning intellect.
Maybe I’m asking for too much.
By the way, what’s up with all the fictional super-intellects being guys?
Cyril M. Kornbluth, “The Marching Morons”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
The problem is that in order to imagine what a super-intelligent person would do, you either have to *be* a super-intelligent person, or you have to put in hours of work to figure out what they understand intuitively.
The nearest I’ve seen to this is depictions of super-intelligent children: they’re merely as clever as smart adults, so the author can pull it off. Ender’s Game and Eliezer Yudkowski’s fanfic “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” come to mind. (The latter is easily worthy of the former, by the way. I highly recommend it.)