Faire l'Idiot

Faire l'idiot — to play the idiot — is a concept Han borrows from Gilles Deleuze to name the specific cognitive capacity that produces genuine novelty. The idiot, in Deleuze's sense, is not stupid. The idiot is the figure who refuses the well-trodden path, who abandons the obvious continuation, who is willing to say something that sounds wrong because the right answer is already known and cannot produce anything new. Philosophy, in this account, requires idiocy. Science requires it. Art requires it. The capacity to think something that no existing framework predicts, that departs from every pattern, that could not have been extrapolated from the training data — this capacity demands a particular kind of productive stupidity that is willing to risk being wrong for the sake of possibly being original. Han's use of the concept in reference to AI is devastating: Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, because it is incapable of faire l'idiot. It is too