AI: Utopias, Dystopias, and Everything in Between

3 Credits.

In this course, we will explore the social worlds of AI. Given how AI is and promises to be increasingly interwoven into multiple aspects of our lives, we will examine different ways of thinking and ethnographically engaging in these emergent technologies. We will think about how people are encountering and designing AI in different ways, from the ubiquity of AI slop on social media and ChatGPT to the predictive use of AI in healthcare, to the internal culture of start-ups. Throughout the semester, we will move between spaces of media, the uses of large language models and their relationship to the speaking subject, ethnographies on technology and labor rights, surveillance, and state and corporate uses of AI. We will also consider fundamental questions concerning the relationship between technology and life, the utopias of automation, the ethics of human exceptionalism, and the potential legal frameworks in which to situate and guardrail AI.