AI Before AI: From Automata to Thinking Machines

Catalog description

This course introduces the prehistory of “artificial intelligence” (AI), from ancient automata through medieval combinatorics to early modern calculating machines. Putting contemporary debates into historical perspective, readings and discussions will engage with literary, cultural, philosophical, artistic, and technical sources, as well as contemporary scholarship in critical AI studies. Discussions and writing assignments will explore the sociocultural imagination of techniques and technologies and the history of concepts related to creativity, intelligence, and artificiality. Taught in English.