Index# 03731
Will count toward SAS – English Major
Will count toward SAS – English Minor
For the last several years, following on a number of significant “machine learning” breakthroughs, talk of “artificial intelligence” (AI) has made a comeback. Especially strong in business and technology circles, discussion of an AI-powered fourth industrial revolution now ripples through the popular imagination. Fictions of Artificial Intelligence, which blends narrative fiction in several media—literature, film, serial television—with readings by leading AI thinkers, will help students to critically engage this new cultural and technological phenomenon. Designed to hone critical thinking, ask big questions, spark innovative research questions, sharpen effective communications across disciplinary divides, and cultivate appreciation of narrative art, Fictions of Artificial Intelligence will provide students with an inviting introduction to urgent topics of ethical, cultural, scientific, and humanistic concern.
Whereas the AI efforts of previous decades took human intelligence for their goalpost (so-called “strong” or “general” AI), AI today is “narrow.” Though wonderfully adept at particular tasks (e.g., detecting some cancers, translating text from one language to another, or playing Go), “narrow” AI uses mathematical models to compute and find patterns in huge data sets. Premised on the ability to process massive troves of data at unprecedented speed—and despite a confusing rhetoric of “neural” networks and “deep learning”—today’s AI programs neither resemble human brains nor simulate human intelligence. Lacking sentience, emotion, and a concept of the world, these powerful programs do not cognize the data points they plot and model. Defeating the world’s best Go player, they have no sense of “winning” or “play”; translating French into English, they do not “understand” or “speak” either language or have any integral understanding of what language is.
Reading excerpts from leading interdisciplinary thinkers on machine learning and AI (including Yoshua Bengio, Eden Medina, Safiya Noble, Judea Pearl, Susan Schneider, Emma Strubell, Alan Turing, and Amy Webb), students in Fictions of Artificial Intelligence will learn the ways in which so-called narrow AI has the potential to be a force for public good. Whether helping to automate repetitive tasks, detecting disease, or singling out fraud, today’s machine learning programs produce real benefits and create new efficiencies. Indeed, the government of Finland has launched a program to facilitate accessible, publicly accountable, and non-commercial AI technologies. A key challenge for such goals, however, is that the general public—including many highly educated people and our brightest students—cannot easily to distinguish between technologies that offer such public benefits and the “hype” and “clickbait” that dominates discussion of the topic. Whether trumpeting “innovation,” “disruption,” and investment opportunities, or circulating doomsday narratives of mass unemployment, superhuman intelligence, and robot takeover, these exaggerated rhetorics of AI have become obstacles to critical understanding and creative engagement.
From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to HBO’s Westworld and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me a century later, narrative storytelling provides a crucial means of contemplating the intellectual, social, and moral consequences of new technologies that pressure boundaries between human and machine. Fictions of Artificial Intelligence will combine non-fiction readings from interdisciplinary experts with these and other fictional works including Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, Blade Runner; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine; Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein. As they read and explore this powerful selection of storytelling art, students will develop the ability to speak intelligently about new technologies, understand key research challenges for computer scientists and others, and grasp some of the most important ethical questions of our century.
About Professor Goodlad
LAUREN M.E. GOODLAD is Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as a faculty affiliate of the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), the Rutgers British Studies Center, and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. At the University of Illinois, where she taught until 2017, Goodlad was a Kathryn Paul Professorial Scholar, University Scholar, Provost Fellow for Undergraduate Education, and the director of the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory (2008-14). At Rutgers, she is now Associate Chair of English, a member of the executive committees for Graduate Studies, the CCA, and RBSC, as well as chair of a new interdisciplinary initiative on Critical Artificial Intelligence. She is currently completing a book that includes a chapter on literature and artificial intelligence.