re: #58 The Ghost of a Flea

I’m thinking of an old Larry Niven story where an individual from a race that had ruled the galaxy for 2 billion years gave a human the design for the most intelligent machine they had ever built.

Its answer to every important question was, ‘insufficient data’.

One day the intelligence was gone. The machine was still there but ‘it’ was gone.

Another member of the alien race told the main character that all their super AIs did the same thing. “Maybe if we knew what they knew we’d shut ourselves off as well.”