Michel in particular is afflicted by sadness, his hyper-intelligence condemning him to all too frank an apprehension of the way things are going.
The great, unfulfilled, hope of American fiction in the 1930s, Delmore Schwartz, put this explicitly: "For the first time in fiction America's social mobility has been transformed into a spiritual energy which is not doomed to flight, renunciation, exile, denunciation, the agonised hyper-intelligence of Henry James, or the hysterical cheering of Walter Whitman".
The most dramatised detective after Holmes and Poirot, Commissaire Jules Maigret (1931-72), is again distanced from the template by his Parisian location, but he too has certain Holmesian aspects (hyper-intelligence, a pipe) that feel like deliberate nods from his creator, the officially Belgian but temperamentally French Georges Simenon (1903-89).
As Delmore Schwartz phrased it in an early review: 'For the first time in fiction, America's social mobility has been transformed into a spiritual energy which is not doomed to flight, renunciation, exile, denunciation, the agonised hyper-intelligence of Henry James, or the hysterical cheering of Walter Whitman.' Bellow was born in Quebec and smuggled across the Great Lakes when he was an infant.
You may object that a massive bit-processing rate is only a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for generating hyper-intelligence.
Presumably it's the satisfaction of knowing that even if we are wiped out by the ceaseless march of technology and hyper-intelligence, the cyborgs we are replaced by will be just as pissed-up and incompetent as we are.
It's a hyper-sophisticated artificial intelligence with a female voice called Samantha, played by Scarlett Johansson.
With its "hyper focus" on the intelligence flowing from its own set-top boxes (augmented with set-top box information from roughly a half dozen cable operators) TiVo can connect with virtually any data set--including browser cookies and device ID's.
Mining the collective intelligence of hyper-healthy micro-communities for transportable lessons in wellness is also the foundation of YogaEarth, a nutrition company I founded to tap into the rich knowledge base of yoga teachers in mind-body wellness.
…I've talked to many roboticists and artificial intelligence researchers who were inspired by hyper-competent bogeymen, from 2001's HAL 9000 to the Terminator's T-800.
