Floridi Introducing “Stupefication”

The context in which Floridi introduces the concept of “stupefication” is with regard to drawing a distinction between GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence) and LAI (Light Artificial Intelligence.) The former “attempted to stupefy the mind” (150). The latter attempts to stupefy tasks.

From this point forward, Floridi applies the terms “stupefy” and “stupefication” to tasks; and what he means by “stupefy the mind” isn’t entirely clear, but it’s a good bet that he means something along the lines of “formalize.” And by “formalize,” I mean “to make into a formal system.”

This seems in harmony with the main point Floridi makes: That GOFAI is mimetic; whereas LAI is not. (Synonyms Floridi uses for “non-mimetic” are “performance-oriented” and “constructionist” [150].) The idea of turning the mind into a formal system is equivalent to the idea of creating a formal system that would function in a way isomorphic to the way that the human mind functions. And we can further stipulate that the tasks this hypothetical formalized mind might accomplish would be accomplished in a way isomorphic to the way an intelligent human would accomplish them. But stupefying (or formalizing) a task, on the other hand, frees the formal system from any kind of mimetic constraint, meaning that LAI’s primary focus is on the task’s successful completion rather than on the way that task was completed.

As far as Floridi is concerned (and as far as I am concerned), projects that focus on the stupefication of the mind are doomed to failure, whereas projects that seek to stupefy tasks have already yielded many astonishing results.

Citations:

Floridi, Luciano. Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.