This essay presents a framing of stupidity as requiring the capacity for intelligence. Stupidity is not the opposite ...

This essay presents a framing of stupidity as requiring the capacity for intelligence. Stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence but its evil twin, the dissimulating Cain to a cerebral Abel. And perhaps surprisingly, the degree of stupidity available to any system scales directly with the intelligence that system possesses—more intelligence begets greater feats of stupidity. It would be a stretch to call a bacterium stupid, and we know that cats and dogs achieve modest feats of it. But human beings, equipped with language, abstraction, technology, institutions, and ideology, can be stupid on a truly civilizational scale. What Makes Humans Stupid, by David C. Krakauer. This has interesting implications then for artificial intelligence. If we believe that a system is able to behave intelligently, then by that reasoning we would have to allow it can also misbehave in a stupid fashion. What’s more: the greater its intelligence the greater its possible stupidity, too.