A history of artificial intelligence from a global perspective
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:
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.