CONCEPT
The Intelligence Trap
De Bono's term for the phenomenon in which highly intelligent people become prisoners of their own analytical power — using vertical precision to entrench rather than explore, and now the default mode of AI collaboration without lateral intervention.
The intelligence trap is the characteristic failure mode of vertical thinking applied to problems that require framework change. The more skillfully you can defend a position, the less likely you are to see that the position itself might be the wrong one to defend. Intelligence, in the vertical sense, becomes a tool for entrenching rather than exploring. The brilliant lawyer who can argue any side of a case may never notice that the case itself is the wrong frame for the problem. The gifted engineer who can optimize any system may never ask whether the system should exist. De Bono identified this trap in the 1970s; AI has reproduced it at industrial scale.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The trap operates through a specific mechanism: deep patterns of expertise make vertical reasoning faster and more accurate within the framework, which reinforces confidence in the framework, which makes the framework harder to question,