CONCEPT
Faire l'Idiot
Deleuze's concept — adopted by Han — for the productive stupidity required to produce genuine novelty; the willingness to abandon trodden paths and stumble into territory where existing maps are useless.
AI is too intelligent to be an 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