What Happens When AI Has Read Everything?

Artificial intelligence has in recent years proved itself to be a quick study, although it is being educated in a manner that would shame the most brutal headmaster. Locked into airtight Borgesian libraries for months with no bathroom breaks or sleep, AIs are told not to emerge until they've finished a self-paced speed course in human culture. On the syllabus: a decent fraction of all the surviving text that we have ever produced. When AIs surface from these epic study sessions, they possess astonishing new abilities. People with the most linguistically supple minds--hyperpolyglots--can reliably flip back and forth between a dozen languages; AIs can now translate between more than 100 in real time.