Term 1

 

Week 1: Introduction

Edgar Allan Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” Southern Literary Messenger (April 1836): 2:318-326 [https://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm]

Ambrose Bierce, “Moxon’s Master,” The San Francisco Examiner (April 16, 1899) [https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/MoxoMast.shtml]

Samuel Butler, “The Book of the Machines,” “The Machines (continued),” “The Machines (concluded),” Chapters 23-25, Erewhon; Or, Over the Range (1873) [https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1906/pg1906-images.html#chap23]

 

Unit I: Intelligence

 

Week 2

Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 49 (1950): 433-460.

Karl Marx, “The Fragment on Machines.” The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Classics, 1993. 690-712.

Further reading:

Kevin Padraig Donnelly, “Turing’s Paradox and the Failure of the Sciences of Man.” The Descent of Artificial Intelligence: The Deep History of an Idea 400 Years in the Making (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024.

 

Week 3

Matteo Pasquinelli, “Introduction: AI as Division of Labour,” “The Origins of Marx’s General Intellect,” “Conclusion: The Automation of General Intelligence,” The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. Verso, 2024.

Christopher Newfield, “How to Make ‘AI’ Intelligent; or, The Question of Epistemic Equality.” Critical AI (2023) 1 (1-2).

Further reading:

Frank Pasquale, “Introduction.” New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI. Harvard University Press, 2020.

 

Week 4

Antonio Damasio, “The Body-Minded Brain.” Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Penguin, 2005. 223-244.

Safiya Umoja Noble, “Introduction: The Power of Algorithms” and “Searching for Black Girls.” Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press, 2018.

Further reading:

Derek Beres, “The one thing A.I. needs is the one thing we likely cannot program,” Big Think, May 1, 2028. https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/is-artificial-intelligence-even-possible-without-emotions/

 

Week 5

E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” [1909] https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf

Film viewing: 2001: Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

 

Week 6: Reading week

 

Unit II: Labour

 

Week 7

Karl Marx, “The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities,” Capital Vol. 1 [1867] (Penguin, 1976): 131-37

Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Exploring the Managed Heart,” The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (University of California Press, 1983): 3-23

 

Week 8

Kate Crawford, “Labor,” Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale, 2022)

James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant, “The Extractor.” Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI. Canongate, 2024.

 

Week 9

Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and James Steinhoff, “Introduction: AI-Capital” and “Automating the Social Factory.” Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism. Pluto Press, 2019.

Aaron Benanav, “The Automation Discourse,” “Labor’s Global Deindustrialization” and “Necessity and Freedom.” Automation and the Future of Work (Verso, 2020).

Further reading:

Larry Lohmann, “Labour, Energy and the Colonial Geography of Artificial Intelligence,” Corner House

 

Week 10

Kazuro Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Faber, 2021)

Film viewing: Her (dir. Spike Jonze, 2013)

Term 2

 

Unit III: Nature

 

Week 1

Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (1967)

Kate Crawford, “Earth,” Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale, 2022)

 

Week 2

James Bridle, “Introduction: More than Human” and “Thinking Otherwise.” Thinking Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (Penguin, 2022)

 

Week 3

Peter Dauvergne, “Datafying Life on Earth” and “Conserving and Rewilding Earth.” AI in the Wild: Sustainability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. MIT Press, 2021.

 

Week 4

Karen Bakker, Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth (MIT Press, 2024)

 

Week 5

Richard Powers, Playground (Penguin, 2024)

Film viewing: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Part 2: “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts” (dir. Adam Curtis, 2011)

 

Week 6: Reading week

 

Unit IV: Futures (of Literary AI)

 

Week 7

Peter Frase, Four Futures (Verso, 2015)

 

Week 8

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility”

N. Katherine Hayles, “Subversion of the Human Aura: A Crisis in Representation.” American Literature 95.2 (June 2023): 255-79.

Further reading:

Ted Chiang, “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art,” The New Yorker, August 31, 2024

 

Week 9

Dennis Yi Tenen, “Chapter 1: Intelligence as Metaphor” and “Nine Big Ideas for an Effective Conclusion.” Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write. Norton, 2024.

 

Week 10

Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan, AI 2041 (2021)

Film viewing: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (dir. Stephen Spielberg, 2001)