INFO 6940


From Turing to ChatGPT

A history of artificial intelligence from a global perspective

Fridays ET 11:15AM ~ 1:45PM
@ SNEE HALL GEOLOGICAL SCIENCES 2152
OFFICE HOURS by appointment: calendly.com/unso

This is a course that teaches students a modern history of AI from a global perspective. While ChatGPT and other generative models have taken the world by storm in the last year, AI has a much longer history of scientific development and has been a topic of human imagination and competition for decades. In this interdisciplinary course, students will learn that AI has a complex and multifaceted relationship with its social and economic surroundings. On the one hand AI has developed as a consumer technology with a vision to give inclusive access to more demographics – as search engines, virtual assistants, and education platforms. But it also has a fraught relationship with violence. Arguably, modern AI has been a product of wartime decryption efforts and flourished in surveillance states. It also sets the agenda for social change. The staggering development of types of machine learning and AI methods impacted the rate of change in different parts of society - classification methods made a splash in medical diagnosis while image generation models have impacted creative industries. And as a tribute to “Innovation is the Mother of Necessity,” AI has created new categories of jobs such as prompt engineers while taking away others. Topics we will cover include:

  • Interaction between algorithmic and hardware constraints
  • Large paradigms in AI algorithms (e.g. rule-based methods, neural nets)
  • History of AI philosophy, scifi, forecasting
  • Policy initiatives
  • Generative models – job loss concerns, IP concerns
  • War & military investment and its impact on AI
  • Evolution of AI ethics and controversies
  • Major Silicon Valley players (e.g. Google AI, OpenAI)
  • “AI Winter” of the 1970s & 1980s
  • Meaning of open-source AI; models and frameworks
  • Hidden labor behind labeled data
  • Longtermism, effective altruism, alignment, safety and other modern camps of thought on AI

The course expects the students to come from varied backgrounds including engineering grad students as well as humanists. Material will be semi-technical but friendly to non-engineers.

important dates:

**  Check Syllabus for Course Dates **
1. Classes start: January 24th
2. Midterms [week 10]: March 28th (no class, midterm due midnight)
3. Finals [week 15]: May 10th ~ May 17th