LANGUAGE, RACIAL CAPITALISM, AI

This investigative seminar combines weekly readings on AI written by scholars, activists, artists and others, with student led exploration and research. We begin with a syllabus composed of readings identifying some key issues and questions about the nature of computing and the emergence of AI, and proceed by allowing our discussions and concerns to shape further course reading, research and experimentation. While students are encouraged to focus their semester’s research on the current state of AI considered from a broad set of perspectives, participants may also pursue a topic of their own choosing that they explore in relation to the affordances, challenges and difficulties posed by AI. We are looking for processes to engage with the new capacities of machine learning, recognizing at the outset that a wide variety of positions on AI are possible, ranging from eager optimism, to cautious acceptance, to out and out rejection and resistance.

Because of the broad and indeed planetary questions posed by the gathering momentum of AI — questions that encompass labor, energy, ecology, psychology, race, class, gender, sexuality, colonialism, imperialism, surveillance, finance, warfare, and more, but also including seemingly more mundane issues like homework, search, everyday social engagement, friendship, school, and other personal and social questions — the direction and success of our work together depends heavily on student contributions to class. You are encouraged to consider yourself both as student and teacher, and thus also to take responsibility to learn from the course materials as well as to educate your peers (and the professor) by sharing some of the fruits and insights of your explorations. The depth of your questions, the responsibilities you feel to self, community, ecology, future, and planet, will effect the outcomes of this seminar for you and for all involved. The seminar is designed to help you ask significant questions in relation to a world that has given rise to AI and a world that now seems destined to emerge in some relation to it — questions in which life is at stake.