Course Catalog

Getting Real About Artificial Intelligence

Paul Clermont Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are all over the news. Some pundits wring their hands about massive unemployment and its effects on society. Others wave their hands, pointing out how many “revolutions” in the nature of work we’ve survived without that happening and how much they’ve improved our everyday lives. But is this revolution different? What can it do for our quality of life? What can we do at as individuals or as a society to mitigate potential downsides? It’s still early days for definitive answers to these questions, so the class will be exposed to a range of perspectives. We’ll critically analyze what pundits have to say and apply it concretely to familiar work lives and situations. 1) Historical perspective: revolutions in nature of work. A brief history of robotics and artificial intelligence and differing views of their future impact. 2) Exploring the boundary between what artificial intelligence and robots can do and what’s better left to humans and how it has shifted. How much more can it shift? What are the positives of emerging shifts? 3) Discussion to examine familiar work (our own or that of family / friends) to identify what we wished could have been done by robots or AI vs what soon could be but might better not be. 4) What to advise to younger generations to prepare for the new world and reduce their vulnerability to replacement by hardware and software. 5) Social impacts and how to deal with them. The place of ethics in AI and how robotic approaches (even without robots!) already raise ethical issues. 6) TBA Paul Clermont has consulted in and taught about direction and management of Information Technology (IT) and is a frequent contributor and guest editor for the Cutter Buginese Technology Journal. His four decade saw computers go from elementary bookkeeping to the core of huge businesses that could not exist without them. He has degrees from the massachusetts Institute of Technology and took a course there called “Automata and Artificial Intelligence” in 1964!

This class is not available at this time.

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