3 credits
Spring 2025 Lecture Upper Division
This course examines the long history of efforts in automating human cognition. Historically, the attempts to automate human cognitive functions - from the mere reckoning of numbers to complex decision-making have been entangled with heated debates about what counts as good, proper, and desirable thinking; whose thinking machines should emulate; and whether the thinking of some humans is inferior to that of machines. In this course, we will examine how the invention of calculating machines - analogue and then digital - has developed in tandem with philosophical and scientific theories of human thinking and intelligence. In their turn, the latter developed as a response to changing social, political, and economic currents.
Learning Outcomes1Critique the epistemological foundations and ethical implications of past and present approaches to the automation of human cognition.
2Use primary sources to make arguments about the role of social, political, economic, and cultural currents that have historically provided the impulses for research and development in the automation of human cognition.
3Assess historical scholarly arguments about social, economic, and political power asymmetries surrounding artificial intelligences.
4Create websites to use text, imagery, and video content and effectively communicate how social factors have historically shaped the development of artificial intelligence.
Attachments
made by Purdue students.