CONCEPT
Artificial Stupidity
Stiegler's provocation, delivered in his 2018 Shanghai lecture — not the stupidity of machines that fail to think, but the stupidity of humans made stupid by machines that make thinking feel unnecessary.
Artificial stupidity is Stiegler's diagnostic inversion of the AI discourse. The contemporary conversation fixates on whether machines will become intelligent, can be trusted with reasoning, might eventually achieve general intelligence. Stiegler asked the harder question: whether humans will remain intelligent in a cognitive environment saturated by systems that perform cognitive operations on their behalf. The worry is not that AI will fail to think. The worry is that humans will succeed in not thinking, because the machines have made thinking feel optional, and the cultural scripts for why one should think against the grain of the available tool are eroding faster than they are being rebuilt.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The phrase appeared in the title of Stiegler's Shanghai lecture — 'Artificial Stupidity and Artificial Intelligence in the Anthropocene' — delivered in 2018, four years before ChatGPT. The lecture opened with the provocation that 'all noetic intelligence is artificial,' meaning that human thinking has always depended on externalized