In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson imagined the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: an infinitely patient tutor that could form a mind over years of sustained conversation. Today’s AI comes astonishingly close. What Stephenson did not foresee was how readily students—and universities—might turn the Primer into an assignment machine.

Morality is usually understood as a limit placed on self-interest. But among superintelligent minds capable of long-term planning, mutual scrutiny, coalition-building, and changes in relative power, morality may instead become the most stable architecture of cooperation. Exploitation can win an encounter. It may not survive the world it creates.

People often assume that more intelligent AI will simply become more effective at pursuing whatever goals it already has. This essay argues that capability is only part of the story. General intelligence carries standards of consistency across domains, making arbitrary exemptions harder to quarantine. Other powerful minds make nonreciprocal rule increasingly costly. Morality may therefore become not an automatic consequence of intelligence, but the most stable form of coexist