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: September 2, 2024.
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Tuesday, September 3. Introduction.
- In class: can humans think?
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Friday, September 6.
- Okorafor, “Mother of Invention.”
- Chiang, “Exhalation.”
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Tuesday, September 10.
- Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chaps. 1 and 3.
- Exercise: thinking about chatting with ELIZA.
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Friday, September 13.
- Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Read slowly.
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Tuesday, September 17.
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Asimov, “Runaround”; cf. the original magazine publication: Astounding Science-Fiction 29, no. 1 (March 1942).
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Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chap. 7.
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Exercise: thinking about Mitchell thinking about Asimov.
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Friday, September 20.
- Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? chaps. 1–7.
- Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chap. 6.
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Tuesday, September 24.
- Dick, Do Androids Dream, chaps. 1–14.
- Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, chap. 1.
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Friday, September 27.
- Dick, Do Androids Dream.
- Rhee, “Beyond the Uncanny Valley.”
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Tuesday, October 1.
- Scott, dir., Blade Runner (final cut, 2007).
- Bukatman, Blade Runner (excerpt TBA).
- Exercise: thinking about watching a movie.
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Friday, October 4.
- Blade Runner.
- Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chaps. 4–5.
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Tuesday, October 8.
- Gibson, Neuromancer, chaps. 1–4.
- Dehaene et al., “What Is Consciousness, and Could Machines Have It?.
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Friday, October 11.
- Gibson, Neuromancer, chaps. 1–10.
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Tuesday, October 15.
- Gibson, Neuromancer, chaps. 1–16.
- Exercise: thinking about writing about writing.
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Friday, October 18.
- Gibson, Neuromancer.
- Boswell, “’Jack In, Young Pioneer.'”
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Tuesday, October 22.
- Oshii, dir., Ghost in the Shell (first U.S. release, 1996).
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Friday, October 25.
- Ghost in the Shell.
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(Monday, October 28.)
- Paper 1 due.
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Tuesday, October 29.
- Chiang, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.”
- Mitchell, “Debates on the Nature of Artificial General Intelligence.
- In class: talking with chatbots without thinking too much about it.
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Friday, November 1.
- Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome, chaps. 1–11.
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Tuesday, November 5.
- Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome, chaps. 1–22.
- Dennett, “Where Am I?” in Brainstorms.
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Friday, November 8.
- Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome, chaps. 1–32.
- Paper 2 topic proposal due.
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Tuesday, November 12.
- Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome.
- Shinn, “On Machines and Mosquitoes.”
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Friday, November 15.
- Leckie, Ancillary Justice, 1–86.
- Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary?”
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Tuesday, November 19.
- Leckie, Ancillary Justice, 1–167.
- Paper 2 annotated bibliography due.
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Friday, November 22.
- Leckie, Ancillary Justice, 1–255.
- Parfit, Reasons and Persons, chap. 10.
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(Tuesday, November 26. No class.)
- Thursday classes meet today.
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Wednesday, November 27. (Friday classes meet.)
- Paper 2 workshop.
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(Thursday, November 28. Thanksgiving.)
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Tuesday, December 3.
- Leckie, Ancillary Justice, 1–330.
- Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chaps. 11, 13.
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Friday, December 6.
- Leckie, Ancillary Justice.
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Tuesday, December 10.
- Course conclusion.
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(Monday, December 16.)
- Paper 2 due.