It has become fashionable among the tech elite to sell hyperbolic, albeit vague, visions of an AI-dominated future. Artificial General Intelligence—as yet unrealized, perhaps unrealizable—is imagined as achieving human-level intelligence, and Artificial Superintelligence orders of magnitude more. An age of unlimited abundance and human flourishing is said to hang in the balance—if, that is, these technologies do not first annihilate their makers. Utopian promises are aggressively peddled alongside warnings of existential risk (“xrisk”), both of which keep the consumer and investor laity in thrall. But already and increasingly, Artificial Narrow Intelligence—so-called “weak AI”—permeates so much of the quotidian activity of our daily lives, from voice assistance and facial recognition to the transportation, education, and medical sectors. What are we actually talking about, and interacting with, when it comes to AI? How have the idea and the implementation of artificial intelligence evolved, among researchers and in the broader cultural imaginary? And what justifies the most extreme beliefs in the most totalizing visions of superhuman intelligence? What, if any, of these visions are possible, much less inevitable, imminent, or desirable?
In this class, we will study the history of AI, the design of modern generative AI systems, and the politics, philosophy, and science of data and intelligence. Beginning with the basics, we will ask: How do generative AI chatbots actually work? How do such digital systems interface with the real world? Dilating out from there, into epistemic, political, and cultural domains, we’ll consider: What does it mean to know or to understand something? Can a digital system know or understand? How do cognitive scientists and neuroscientists understand consciousness and intelligence? What are the ideologies—from TESCREAL to e/acc—underwriting the push to develop ever more “powerful” AI? And how is this push implicated in the logics of eugenics and colonialism? How do these very logics imbue the notion of intelligence itself? Readings will draw on the work of computer and cognitive scientists as well as philosophers, techno-optimists, and critics of technology, including Alan Turing, Joseph Weizenbaum, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Donna Haraway, Ursula Franklin, Ruha Benjamin, Heather Douglas, Timnit Gebru, Émile P. Torres, Emily Bender, Alex Hanna, Abebe Birhane, Iris Van Rooij, and Damien Williams.
