Intelligence

There may be no human trait more widely valued than intelligence. Yet questions about what intelligence actually is, and how to measure it, have dogged educators, employers and governments for the better part of a century.

Even today, children's intelligence is routinely tested in schools — though there's still no agreement on what a fair test looks like, or how the results should be used. And as computers become ubiquitous, they raise their own version of the question: can machines be intelligent? And if they can, will theirs be a superior kind?

These questions, and the way they connect, only grow more pressing as we move further into the Information Age. In a society where information generates wealth, intelligence is becoming the primary — and perhaps the only — currency of power. Shot in locations ranging from hospitals to military installations, Intelligence weaves together the perspectives of schoolchildren, neurologists, philosophers and spies. Holding it all together is a retelling of The Emperor's New Clothes, casting the ambitions of a wired world in a new, and comic, light.