02.11.2026
Exactly how big was the ego of S.? He was always blustering about his achievements and his intellect. He was proud of the genes that gave him his mind. But he was also just as equally proud of all of his hard work which had got him to where he was. Over six hundred books on his bookshelves at home. Five degrees. More qualifications and certificates in learning on top of that. Six ‘A’ Levels at the same time. He was a self made mind.
Today, we had been talking as we traipsed around another art gallery, him in a warm, red coat in this freezing weather, and he had begun boasting about how he was completely unthreatened by Artificial Intelligence. He was gazing at an AI poster on the wall. It had given a silly reply to a question we had thought up for it.
‘Not very impressive, is it?’ he said.
‘It talks to you though, at least.’ I ventured. I wasn’t particularly impressed either though, it must be said. The look on the AI model’s face was particularly insipid.
‘You realise that AI will never be as clever as me?’ said S.
‘How do you know?’ I answered back.
‘Because I am a genius’ said S. ‘You cannot replicate genius with a computer. I can see things which no one else can see. So how is a computer supposed to see them? The things I know, nobody else knows. So how will the computer know them? My genius relies on intuition and free association. Do you think a computer has intuition and free association? Do you think that a computer can compete with my creativity and imagination? A computer does not have an unconscious like mine that does all the work for me. It cannot and it will never be able to. People like me come around every few hundred or a thousand years. People whose conscious and unconscious mind are at one with each other. Do you think that a computer can compare with that?’ S. smirked complacently at me.
‘You are always telling me that you have got nothing out of your genius,’ I protested. ‘No one listens to you and barely a handful of people read anything that you write.’
‘Again, that does not threaten me. They are just too imbecilic to understand what a genius is writing and the importance of it. They are just proving that I am a genius and that I am ahead of my time.’
You had to admire him. Nothing fazed him. He never doubted that he was a genius and that he was peerless. However hostile the world was to him, he kept on working away at his thoughts and his intellectual pursuits. His complacency and self admiration were his protection, his resilience and his inspiration to keep on performing.
