[helloworld11]

>That's the problem with any superintelligence story; they are by definition hard to write without being superintelligent. As Vinge was famously told, "you can't write this story. No one can." If a chimpanzee could write a story about a human expert of any sort, the other chimpanzees wouldn't understand it: it would either be gibberish, or dumbed down to superficial analogies that give an illusion of understanding. ("Then he used his rifle -" "what's a rifle?" "it's a stick which is like throwing a rock. Anyway, he traded some bananas for it with another monkey off the Internet." "What's an Internet?" "uh...")

I'm not entirely sure if that's true. It might be, I honestly don't know, but my personal suspicion is that there's such a thing as what I'll just go ahead and call a threshold intelligence level. In other words, a level of cognitive capacity beyond which a creature that attains said level can functionally conceptualize things far above its actual ability to understand them in detail. This allows discussion and exploration of certain extremely advanced concepts well enough to form a narrative without falling into complete incomprehension.

Chimpanzees might be far enough below this threshold level that even a basic story would cause them difficulty no matter how learned they are educated or bred to be, and a complex story about, say space ships or high performance aircraft would be completely outside their conception. Humans on the other hand might be able to stretch their imagination much further towards the extremes of conceptualization. However, I also think it might have its limits, namely that there are things which if explained to us would leave even the brightest humans as befuddled as a dog being lectured on internal combustion mechanics.