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Ted Chiang wrote a short story inspired by Flowers for Algernon ("Understand") t... | Hacker News

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'Flowers' gets around it by starting with a mentally retarded protagonist and specifically trying to avoid any consequences of superintelligence beyond the emotional & social journey, so most of the story is accomplished 'on the runway', as it were, and is about everything but what he learns & does with his intelligence which is pushed into the background. You can see how it starts getting handwavy as soon as the protagonist takes off to smarter than Keys himself, and he starts having to show the progress by him simply doing ordinary-human things but much faster than a dimmer human, like rearranging the bakery for more efficiency or learning Sanskrit in a week. While it's nice to be able to read German or Sanskrit, it's not particularly useful, especially if you are interested in neuroscience; a real protagonist would be doing things Keys can't even imagine, which sound like gibberish like 'ordinary differential equations' or 'symplectic manifold'. Any societal implications are simply

Ted Chiang wrote a short story inspired by Flowers for Algernon ("Understand") t... | Hacker News Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login blader on June 25, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Flowers for Algernon (1965) [pdf] Ted Chiang wrote a short story inspired by Flowers for Algernon ("Understand") that explores what might happen if a guy just never stopped getting smarter: https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini... I love Flowers for Algernon, but Understand is my favorite short story of all time.

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