PHIL 143.001 – AI and the Future of Humanity: Philosophical Issues about Technology and Human Survival

Instructor: Shanna Slank. This course meets MWF 12:20 – 1:10 p.m. in CW 105.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) develops at an extremely rapid pace, predictions about how AI will affect humanity tend to occupy two extremes: There are the optimists, who believe that AI advancement will bring about a global techno-utopia, and the pessimists, who believe AI advancement will eventually bring about our extinction. In this course, we’ll spend some time considering these perspectives and the ethical issues that they press, but we will also explore a wide variety of other issues that make the philosophical study of AI so exciting. We’ll ask big picture questions about what’s possible – for example, whether AI may have the capacity for consciousness and morality. But we will also ask more focused questions that are relevant to the here-and-now – for example, about ethical issues that arise when we deploy our current technology in specific domains (e.g., art, investment, law, media, medicine, the military, and politics).