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How do we accomodate ourselves to the prospect of an intelligence far greater than our own? In a consideration of J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (the first recognized appearance of the concept in modern Englis-language literature), Ted Chiang unspools the intellectual and cultural history of this now-prevalant trope…

J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder is generally considered to be the first fictional treatment of superhuman intelligence, or “superintelligence.” This is a familiar trope for readers of science fiction today, but when the novel was originally published in 1911 it was anything but. What intellectual soil needed to be tilled before this idea could sprout?

At least since Plato, Western thought has clung to the idea of a Great Chain of Being, also known as the scala naturae, a system of classification in which plants rank below animals; humans rank above animals but below angels; and angels rank above humans but below God. There was no implied movement to this hierarchy; no one expected that plants would turn into animals given enough time, or that humans would turn into angels.

But by the 1800s, naturalists like Lamarck were questioning the assumption that species were immutable; they suggested that over time organisms actually grew more complex, with the human species as the pinnacle of the process. Darwin brought these speculations into public consciousness in 1859 with On the Origin of Species, and while he emphasized that evolution branches in many directions without any predetermined goal in mind, most people came to think of evolution as a linear progression.

Only then, I think, was it possible to conceive of humanity as a point on a line that could keep extending, to imagine something that would be more than human without being supernatural.

Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton, was the first to suggest the idea that mental attributes like intelligence could be quantified. Galton published a volume called Hereditary Genius in 1869, and during the 1880s and ’90s he measured people’s reaction times as a way of gauging their mental ability, pioneering what we now call the field of psychometrics. By 1905, Alfred Binet had introduced a questionnaire to measure children’s intelligence; such questionnaires would evolve into IQ tests. The validity of psychometrics is quite controversial nowadays, as people disagree about what “intelligence” means and to what extent it can be measured. Some modern cognitive scientists do not consider the term intelligence particularly useful, instead preferring to use more specific terms like executive function, attentional control, or theory of mind. In the future “intelligence” may be regarded as a historical curiosity, like phlogiston, but until we develop a more precise vocabulary, we continue to use the term. Our contemporary notion of intelligence first gained currency around the time that Beresford was writing, and one can see how that converged with the idea of the superhuman in The Hampdenshire Wonder.

The titular character of The Hampdenshire Wonder is a boy named Victor Stott…

… Victor is born with an enormous head but an ordinary body, which disappoints his athletic father but also points to certain assumptions we have about the relationship between the mental and the physical. Beresford could have made Victor both an athlete and a genius, but he opted instead to follow a trope perhaps originated by Wells: the idea that evolution is pushing humanity toward a giant-brained phenotype, which is itself implicitly premised on the idea that mental ability and physical ability are in opposition to one another. This has remained a common trope in science fiction, although there are occasional depictions of mental and physical ability going hand in hand…

[Chiang traces the development of the “superintelligence,” the problems it raises, and the ways that they are treated in The Hampdenshire Wonder and elsewhere– “whatever your wisdom, you have to live in a world of comparative ignorance, a world which cannot appreciate you, but which can and will fall back upon the compelling power of the savage—the resort to physical, brute force.”…]

… In 1993 [Vernor] Vinge [here] argued that progress in computer technology would inevitably lead to a machine form of superintelligence. He proposed the term “the singularity” to describe the date—in the next few decades—beyond which events would be impossible to imagine. Since then, the technological singularity has largely replaced biological superintelligence as a trope in science fiction. More than that, it has become a trope in the Silicon Valley tech industry, giving rise to a discourse that is positively eschatological in tone. Superintelligence lies on the other side of a conceptual event horizon. When considered as a purely fictional idea, it imposes a limit on the kind of narratives one can tell about it. But when you start imagining it as something that could exist in reality, it becomes an end to human narratives altogether.

The Hampdenshire Wonder does posit a kind of eschatological scenario, but of a completely different order. After Victor’s downfall, Challis recounts the conclusion he came to after a conversation he’d had with the child, revealing a profound terror about the finiteness of knowledge:

Don’t you see that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment—the solved problem has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge implies the peace of death…

… The idea that the search for understanding will inevitably lead to a kind of cognitive heat death is an interesting one. I don’t believe it and I doubt any scientist believes it, so it’s curious that Beresford—clearly an admirer of scientists—apparently did. Challis talks about the need for mysteries that elude explanation, which is a surprisingly anti-intellectual stance to find in a novel about superintelligence. While there is arguably a strain of anti-intellectualism in stories where superintelligent characters bring about their own downfall, those can just as easily be understood as warnings about hubris, a literary device employed as far back as the first recorded literature, “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” But The Hampdenshire Wonder, in its final pages, is making an altogether different claim: The pursuit of knowledge itself is ultimately self-defeating.

Nowadays we associate the word “prodigy” with precocious children, but in centuries past the word was used to describe anything monstrous. Victor Stott clearly qualifies as a prodigy in the modern sense, but he qualifies in the older sense too: Not only does he frighten the ignorant and superstitious, he induces a profound terror in the educated and intellectual. Seen in this light, the first novel about superintelligence is actually a work of horror SF, a cautionary tale about the dangers of knowing too much…

Superintelligence and its discontents, from @ted-chiang.bsky.social‬ in @literaryhub.bsky.social‬.

Another powerful (and not unrelated) piece from Chiang: “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?“

* Kelly Thompson, The Girl Who Would Be King

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As we wrestle with reason, we might wish a Joyeux Anniversaire to silk weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard; he was born on this date in 1752.  Jacquard’s 1805 invention of the programmable power loom, controlled by a series of punched “instruction” cards and capable of weaving essentially any pattern, ignited a technological revolution in the textile industry… indeed, it set off a chain of revolutions: it inspired Charles Babbage in the design of his “Difference Engine” (the ur-computer), and later, Herman Hollerith, who used punched cards in the “tabulator” that he created for the 1890 Census… and in so doing, pioneered the use of those cards for computer input… which is to say that Jacquard helped create the preconditions for AI (among all of the other things that computers can do).

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