This is a syllabus made for Cornell Info Sci Spring 2025
This history class is non-chronological and layers themes and topics over a fixed time period (ca. 1940s ~ present) throughout. Most of it considers the 20th century but there are some bits of early modern content.
Each Friday class starts with a lecture, followed by a student group presentation and activities, and ends with discussion. Refer to assignments for further information.
January 24th
Week 1: Intro, how to define AI (for this class)?
Course intro, types of AI, large paradigms in AI, course logistics, split into student groups, etc.
January 31st
Week 2: Early Modern to Modern AI
Ancient AI, automata, naturalism vs. mechanism, New Science, Turing, Dartmouth Conference, Cybernetics
Reading: The Restless Clock: a History of the Centuries-long Argument over what Makes Living Things Tick [Jessica Riskin]
February 7th
Week 3: AI & War
ARPA/DARPA, defense funds, digital computers, surveillance AI, Microworlds, Stategic Computing Initiative, Man Computer Symbiosis
Reading: The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency -- Chapters 1,2,3,9,14,15,24,25,26 [Annie Jacobsen]
February 14th
Week 4: Chatbots to Transformers
ELIZA, SIRI, rule-based to connectionist, Information Retrieval, Expert Systems, Machine Translation, Deep Learning, Transformers
Reading: Vox ex Machina: A Cultural History of Talking Machines [Sarah A. Bell]
February 21st
Week 5: The Imagined AI
AI scifi, forecasting & philosophy
Is AI conscious? Hal from 2001: Space Odyssey, Terminator, recent camps of thought on AI,
Alignment Problem, Effective Altruism, "Stop-AI" Movement, "Superintelligence"
Reading: The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI [Ray Kurzweil] -- Chapters 1,2,3,4,7
February 28th
Week 6: AI in Silicon Valley
DeepMind, IBM, OpenAI, Google Brain & FAIR/Meta AI
Reading: Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World [Parmy Olson]
March 7th
Week 7: Tale of Two AI's: Gaming and Health
Guest Lecture: Sharon Kim (Cornell Class of '99!!) Founder & CEO of MPilotAI (https://mpilot.ai/)
Reading: ArtificiaI Intelligence and Games (just Intro) [Georgios Yannakakis, Julian Togelius], Playing with Reality: How Games have Shaped Our World [Kelly Clancy]
March 14th
Week 8: Hardware for AI
TSMC, Samsung, Nvidia, GPUs, TPUs, NPUs
Reading: Chip War: the Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology [Chris Miller]
March 21st
Week 9: Data & AI
NIST mugshots, Internet Archive, AlexNet & ImageNet, Benchmark datasets, Internet-scale data
Reading: Feeding the Machine: the Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I. [James Muldoon]
March 28th
Week 10: Midterms (!) due by midnight
April 11th
Week 11: Generative AI & Agents
Creativitiy, traditional "human" professional jobs, AGI
Reading: The Future of the Professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts [Richard E. Susskind, Daniel Susskind]
April 18th
Week 12: AI Ethics, Labelers, and other Controversies
Jobs, AI labelers in the global South, environmental issues
Reading: Nexus: a Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI [Yuval Harari]
April 25th
Week 13: Robots & Autonomous Vehicles
Self driving cars, first humanoids, Japanese robots
Reading: Flesh and Machines: how Robots will Change us [Rodney A. Brooks]
May 2nd
Week 14: AI Policy, Global Economics & the Future
Brussels Effect in AI, human-level AI
(pending) Guest Lecture from OpenAI Researcher
Reading: Brussels Effect: how the EU Rules the World [Anu Bradford]