Stupidity as Research Method

Stupidity, not creativity or objectivity, will save us. It will save us from the collapse of difference produced by the advance of AI, which is – apparently – making artificial and human intelligence increasingly indistinguishable. Narratives of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) are taking this fantasy further. Regardless of the reality or impossibility of this modern project, in this presentation I suggest that stupidity is the epistemic virtue that should be “cultivated” in the sciences, arts, and humanities to avoid this collapse of difference. Drawing on sociology and philosophy of science and related fields, stupidity is understood not as lack of knowledge, understanding or judgement, or even excess of reason, but as a failure of sensitivity to playing the game of truth, guided by the faculty of imagination – a sort of forgotten faculty in the history of philosophy. Stupidity is thus a form of refusal and, therefore, a source of ethical life. To prevent knowledge creation from becoming repetitive, innocuous, and futile, a new ethics of knowing and research method is needed. Rather than creativity, which seems to have been captured by current AI (market) logic, stupidity emerges as a form of refusal that plays between the boundaries defined by current power relations.