Long before today’s sensational headlines about so-called AI, science fiction writers and filmmakers were dreaming up countless thinking and feeling machines: rebel robots, emotional androids, cyborg machine-human hybrids, digital souls without bodies. Reading these fictions, this seminar explores how writing and visual culture imagine, interrogate, and critique scientific and technological change, and how the sciences of mind can themselves be intertwined with fictions of artificial intelligence. The course emphasizes humanistic, cultural-historical approaches to interdisciplinary questions. Course materials may include fiction by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Amitav Ghosh, Ann Leckie, Nnedi Okorafor, and Ted Chiang; at least two films (for example, Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott, and Ghost in the Shell, dir. Mamoru Oshii); and short essays by philosophers and cognitive scientists like Alan Turing, Daniel Dennett, Stanislas Dehaene, and Melanie Mitchell. Assignments include discussion-leading, short research and writing assignments, two medium-length interpretive papers about literary or visual texts, and possibly some adversarial chatbot experimentation.