From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Mar 09 2002 - 15:54:36 MST
Personally, my own archetype for "comic-book depiction of fake genius" is
Adrian Veidt, from "The Watchmen". As far as I can tell, the moral of your
tale of Dr. Doom is the same as the moral of "The Watchmen": Comic-book
characters are never any smarter than the authors, regardless of whether the
other characters call them "geniuses", "supergeniuses", "the smartest man in
the world", et cetera. If these characters had real intelligence on the
remote order of that ascribed to them in the story, they would not need to
resort to taking over the world in order to fix it. A competent world-fixer
should be able to solve everything wrong with Earth using a medium-sized
research project and no military force or political coercion.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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