When it works, though, look ahead has an uncanny effect, allowing cubers to link moves so seamlessly that their reflexes seem superhuman.
Here is a man who makes superhuman efforts to stick by his roots in Scotland and dodge tabloid celebrity, only to find that his every move is written up in the papers, usually accompanied by a punning headline derived from The Full Monty.
In this section, Piketty effectively rips apart one of the great lies of the 21st century – that super-managers deserve their money because, like footballers, they have specialised skills which belong to an almost superhuman elite.
But when watching a sporting event, the athlete's almost superhuman fitness, their shape and definition, the fact that they are physically extraordinary, is very much part of the natural admiration we have for sportspeople.
Their concern is altogether more distant and more apocalyptic: the threat of autonomous machines with superhuman cognitive capacity and interests that conflict with those of Homo sapiens.Such artificially intelligent beings are still a very long way off; indeed, it may never be possible to create them.
That is easier than it seems, not least because humans have been creating autonomous entities with superhuman capacities and unaligned interests for some time.
This makes Mr Mohammed sound almost godlike, or at least superhuman, like the X-Men's Magneto: so powerful he must be kept alone in a multibillion-dollar, specially designed cell and guarded by hundreds.
The modern spectator, whether in the ground or on the sofa, is losing the attention span to appreciate such superhuman efforts.
Whereas General Motors GMmakeskes only about $330 in profit per car, Toyota and Nissan make around $1,000, and Honda over $1,600.Before the Japanese set up in America, people like Mr Poling thought the secret of their efficient car-making was superhuman labourers working like crazy on the assembly lines back home.
For him it was both sublime and superhuman.
Yet they also tend to be great team-builders, he says, and not "Randian 'prime movers' who claim to be independent of everybody around them".Nor, despite his optimism about the future, does Mr Thiel fully share Ray Kurzweil's techno-Utopianism: the "Singularity", a future of superhuman artificial intelligence, may be near, but it is not inevitable.
