AI and the Future of Human History
Duke University, Fall 2024
GLS 780
Online A/Synchronous
Instructor: Amanda Starling Gould, PhD
Course Overview
Through conversation, practice, and engagement with technical tools and critical thinkers, we’ll investigate how AI tools are creating knowledge, producing relations, redefining the human, auto-generating evidence and artifacts, and building (and ruining?) worlds. We’ll look at how AI-augmented digital tools and techniques are situated within, and contributing to, systems of oppression (racism, sexism, ableism), both by design and by virtue of their being designed with/in those systems. We’ll interrogate how intelligently augmented tools are governing our actions and interactions – asking ourselves at what point we’ll wonder, Am I AI? – and how AI might be rewriting the past and automatically generating the future.
We’ll think together about how to tell the stories of our research and projects knowing they are co-authored by the tools we use, and we’ll think through methods for how those tools might be hacked, or refused, to manifest more just systems. At its core, this class-qua-learning-lab is really about how we experience the world. If you are already using a digital tool for your research project, you’ll be invited to do a self-study of that tool with the goal of producing a short statement about how the tool is participating in and co-authoring your project.
This class is more about thinking about genAI than about becoming AI superusers. I do think it important you have a bit of hands-on practice w/today’s genAI tools in order to see for yourself and read AI from a position of familiarity. If you want to become a genAI superuser, I’ll invite you to do so and to read AI from a different place. In the best of worlds, in fact, we have a mix of fluencies so that we can talk to each other across difference. Because the general public is generally hearing and thinking a great deal about genAI without a great deal of understanding, we’ll be mirroring the masses.
I’ve pulled together two tracks – which you can follow precisely or interweave:
- With one being focused on learning and testing genAI across platforms with the goal of reading AI from a place of deep literacy
- And the other focused more on toe-dipping into genAI at a distance
We ourselves will be following several threads: what it does, and how it works, what they say it does (and what they promise it doesn’t do), what they say it will do, what we see in action.
Learning Objectives
Together this term we will
- Investigate how artificial intelligence (AI) and “smart” digital tools produce bodies, bodies of knowledge, and bodily relations.
- Articulate how AI and AI-driven (and AI-generated) systems participate in designing humans and societies.
- Interrogate how digital tools, techniques, algorithms, search, and research are situated within and alongside systems of oppression…
- …And unpack our own participation, as bodies of data and datified bodies, in the system(s).
- Evaluate and call on knowledge practices from a wide range of fields and practitioners.
- Cultivate tools, technological and theoretical, for interdisciplinary reading and research.
- Critically evaluate and experiment with various forms of digital tools.
- Develop What If research questions on our quest to be speculative in our scholarly inquiries.
An embedded Generative AI Lab will allow us to add an experimental and experiential element to enhance our learning across the semester; and it will allow the students taking the class and designing the Lab to drive their own explorations of generative AI to better understand how it is at work in the world. A full class project could be to iterate, package, and ‘ship’ this Lab as an add-on for other courses in the GLS portfolio.