1 Artificial Stupidity and Artificial Intelligence in the Anthropocene Bernard Stiegler 23 November 2018, Institute of Ereignis, Shanghai For anyone wanting a precise analysis of what we refer to today as artificial intelligence, which seems now to have become the horizon of everyday life (and I will return to this question), it is necessary to begin from the following postulate: all noetic intelligence is artificial. This implies that there is such a thing as non-noetic intelligence. And it also implies that, generally speaking, noetic life is intelligent in a specific way, which is that of artifice. I claim that there is non-noetic intelligence in the sense implied when Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant talk about metis, but also in the sense invoked by Kevin Kelly when he wrote an article that presented forms of life, of whatever kind, as forms of intelligence, where each of these forms has evolved in a different way over the last three billion years or more. Speaking in this way is for Kelly a matter of opposing what he calls the myth of super-intelligence, but it is also to speak against Descartes: it is to posit that life is never just machinic – and here we should also mention Georges Canguilhem’s ‘Machine and Organism’. 1 Intelligence, here, whether in its ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ forms, but I prefer to say in its organic or organological forms (I will clarify this a bit later on), is the accomplishment of a goal or an aim. There is no necessity at all for this goal to be a conscious representation, as Francisco Varela shows in a drawing in which he ridicules this kind of ‘representational’ hypothesis. What is involved with noetic intelligence, however, is, in principle, access to consciousness, insofar as it has the 1 Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), ch. 4.