Science/Fiction: Ghosts in the Machine, Fall 2024

Long before today’s sensational headlines about so-called AI, science fiction writers and filmmakers were dreaming up countless thinking and feeling machines: rebel robots, emotional androids, cyborg machine-human hybrids, digital souls without bodies. Reading these fictions, this seminar explores how writing and visual culture imagine, interrogate, and critique scientific and technological change, and how the sciences of mind can themselves be intertwined with fictions of artificial intelligence. The course emphasizes humanistic, cultural-historical approaches to interdisciplinary questions. Assignments include discussion-leading, short research and writing assignments, two medium-length interpretive papers about literary or visual texts, and possibly some adversarial chatbot experimentation.

Detailed syllabus (pdf).

Last updated: October 25, 2024.

• Tuesday, September 3. Introduction.

  • In class: can humans think?

• Friday, September 6. Two thinking-machine stories.

  • Okorafor, “Mother of Invention.”
  • Chiang, “Exhalation.”

• Tuesday, September 10. Chatbot, 1966.

  • Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chaps. 1 and 3.
  • Exercise: thinking about chatting with ELIZA.

• Friday, September 13. Imitation games.

  • Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Read slowly.

• Tuesday, September 17. Laws of Robotics.

  • Asimov, “Runaround”; cf. the original magazine publication: Astounding Science-Fiction 29, no. 1 (March 1942).

  • Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chap. 7.

  • Exercise: thinking about Mitchell thinking about Asimov.

• Friday, September 20. Dick (1).

  • Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? chaps. 1–7.

  • Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chap. 6.

    • Adversarial examples for image recognition.
    • Adversarial examples for language models.

• Tuesday, September 24. Dick (2).

  • Dick, Do Androids Dream, chaps. 1–14.

    • Mozart, Die Zauberflöte, Wiener Staatsoper, 2000. (cf. chap. 9).

  • Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, chap. 1.

• Friday, September 27. Dick (3).

  • Dick, Do Androids Dream.
  • Rhee, “Beyond the Uncanny Valley.”

• Tuesday, October 1. Blade Runner (1).

  • Scott, dir., Blade Runner (final cut, 2007).
  • Bukatman, Blade Runner, foreword and chap. 1.
  • Exercise: thinking about watching a movie.

• Friday, October 4. Blade Runner (2).

  • Blade Runner.
  • Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chaps. 4–5.

• Tuesday, October 8. Gibson (1).

  • Gibson, Neuromancer, chaps. 1–4.
  • Dehaene et al., “What Is Consciousness, and Could Machines Have It?”
  • Altogether optional: Boltanski and Chiapello, “The New Spirit of Capitalism.”

• Friday, October 11. Gibson (2).

  • Gibson, Neuromancer, chaps. 1–10.

• Tuesday, October 15. Gibson (3).

  • Gibson, Neuromancer, chaps. 1–16.

• (Wednesday, October 16.)

  • Exercise due: thinking about writing about writing.

• Friday, October 18. Gibson (4).

  • Gibson, Neuromancer.
  • Boswell, “’Jack In, Young Pioneer.'”

• Tuesday, October 22. Ghost in the Shell (1).

  • Oshii, dir., Ghost in the Shell (first U.S. release, 1996).

• Friday, October 25. Ghost in the Shell (2).

  • Ghost in the Shell.
  • Cavallaro, The Cinema of Mamoru Oshii, chaps. 4, 26.

• Tuesday, October 29. Ghosh (1).

  • Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chap. 14.
  • Mitchell, “Debates on the Nature of Artificial General Intelligence.
  • Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome, chaps. 1–2.
  • Optional: Chiang, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.”

• (Wednesday, October 30.)

  • Paper 1 due.

• Friday, November 1. Ghosh (2).

  • Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome, chaps. 1–11.

• Tuesday, November 5. Ghosh (3).

  • Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome, chaps. 1–22.
  • Dennett, “Where Am I?” in Brainstorms.

• Friday, November 8. Ghosh (4).

  • Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome, chaps. 1–32.

• Tuesday, November 12. Ghosh (5).

  • Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome.
  • Shinn, “On Machines and Mosquitoes.”

• Friday, November 15. Leckie (1).

  • Leckie, Ancillary Justice, 1–86.
  • Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary?”

• Tuesday, November 19. Leckie (2).

  • Leckie, Ancillary Justice, 1–167.

• (Thursday, November 21.)

  • Paper 2 annotated bibliography due.

• Friday, November 22. Leckie (3).

  • Leckie, Ancillary Justice, 1–255.

• (Tuesday, November 26. No class.)

  • Thursday classes meet today.

• Wednesday, November 27. (Friday classes meet.)

  • Paper 2 workshop.

• (Thursday, November 28. Thanksgiving.)

• Tuesday, December 3. Leckie (4).

  • Leckie, Ancillary Justice, 1–330.
  • Parfit, Reasons and Persons, chap. 10.

• Friday, December 6. Leckie (5).

  • Leckie, Ancillary Justice.
  • Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chaps. 11, 13.

• Tuesday, December 10. Leckie, concluded; the course, concluded.

  • Leckie, Ancillary Justice.

  • Hear Breq’s voices:

    • Sacred Harp 42, “Clamanda”; listen to a performance: Maine Singing Weekend, 2022; cf. Leckie, 252.

    • “L’homme armé” (Anon., 15th c.); listen to a performance: Clerestory, 2019; cf. Leckie, 335.

    • Missouri Harmony 19, “Bunker Hill”; listen to a performance: Boston Camerata, 2019; cf. Leckie, 216.

• (Wednesday, December 18.)

  • Paper 2 due.