AI: A History

How can history help us understand the current AI hype? And when would a history of AI begin? This course turns to the past to better understand the present. Rather than beginning with the dawn of digital computers, the course situates contemporary artificial intelligence within a longer tradition of attempts to build automata and calculating machines. The course interrogates three interrelated ideas that have been instrumental in the development of AI: Intelligence, Automation, and Fiction. The course will consider questions such as: How have ideas about what intelligence is and who possesses it been inscribed in the computing devices researchers design and build? How in turn have computational approaches shaped what does and does not count as intelligence? What can earlier efforts to automate labor tell us about contemporary conversations about the end of work? And what role has speculative fiction, the promissory, and fictive futurity played in the development of AI?