“Intelligence is independent of personality and emotion, so you can have very intelligent people who are also just kind of crazy people,” Haier said. “Even if everyone had an IQ of 200, you’d have exactly the same range of personalities as you have now, and because that’s a determining factor in how good your society is, you won’t necessarily have a better society.”

Again, consider Isaac Newton: Along with his off-the-charts smarts, he was also a notorious misanthrope.

While petty-crime rates would fall in a society of Newtons, Hunt speculated that white-collar crimes, such as banking scams and cover-ups by pharmaceutical companies, might increase and even grow more sophisticated. On the other hand, so would crime-fighting. “The evil corporate villains would be smarter than ever, but so would the government officials who were writing and enforcing the safety regulations! Who would win? Who knows?” he wrote.