As depicted in the Dune universe:
“A Mentat is a profession or discipline in Frank Herbert’s fictional Dune universe. Mentats are humans trained to mimic computers: human minds developed to staggering heights of cognitive and analytical ability.”
How close could we come? How could we do it?
Many autistic savants have similar abilities. We have no idea how to create one, and many also have serious cognitive difficulties. In addition, most have one specialized savant ability, e.g. calendar skills (“June 5, 16xx was a Tuesday”), or math/counting skills, but it is rare that many appear in one person.
If you watch recent crime drama, you could be forgiven for thinking we’re almost there! You know the type where half the cast are there as scenery, and the other half are data gatherers for the genius main character, who fits all the pieces together just in time for them (or others) to save the day.
IRL, not so much. As thelurkinghorror says, savants exist but tend to be specialists, excelling at one or perhaps a narrow group of subjects.
I’m unaware if anyone is trying to breed from these folks, a la Bene Gesserit, or even if such skills are being closely studied (though I suspect they probably are, somewhere), but really, we’ve no need.
As we are pre-Butlerian Jihad, there’s nothing to stop people making a computer that replicates the functions of a human mind (aside from time to figure it out) and letting that make our decisions. There’s very little chance it will blow up in our face and result in an enslaved humanity, so long as we don’t give them mobility…
Seems like more effort has gone into making computers that behave like people.
The OP sounds like the kind of thing the Scientologists are into.
Autistic savants have odd calculating talents, but these are never in “cognitive and analytical ability.” You’re thinking of a computer as an advanced adding machine, but Mentats are specifically not that.
The only way to come close is to achieve immortality. I’m one of that dying breed: the generalist. I only started to feel comfortable in being “able to sift large volumes of data and devise concise analyses” after 30 years of obsessive reading about everything. That also taught me how little I know about almost everything.
Understanding means making connections based on massed data. There is no real world way to do that except time and hard work.
In the science fiction world, you could throw around input of data into the brain and direct interconnection with a network and suchlike. We’re nowhere near doing any of that. And it’s impossible to understand how such a person could be “without preconception or prejudice.” Herbert was old enough to be part of the generation of engineers who dominated early science fiction and thought they could remake the world through logic because there was One Right Answer to every problem.
We now know that’s a fundamentally flawed assumption. The world is culture, not technology, and culture always has biases. That technology and logic can better run the world is a biased presumption in itself.