Can a computer be intelligent? That is, can the abilities of the human mind be reproduced by computer hardware and software? Dating to the origins of computing, the question of artificial intelligence is among the central problems of the modern age, its ramifications impacting not only computer science and adjacent fields of cognitive science and philosophy of mind, but also long-standing conceptions of human freedom and dignity. Is an autonomous thinking machine possible? What would distinguish it, as a moral subject, from a human?
In this course, students will examine the basic questions, concepts and results of AI science and theory. We’ll begin with the foundational work of Alan Turing, including the Turing Test (described in his famous paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”) and Church-Turing thesis. From Turing we’ll examine subsequent AI theory, including the system symbol hypothesis and the computational theory of mind, which was the template for AI research and thinking for much of the second half of the 20th century. We’ll study, too, an alternative paradigm for AI—neural networking and “deep learning”—and its sundry applications for fields ranging from natural language processing to medicine to autonomous vehicles. Readings will include seminal essays by Turing, John Searle, and Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, and selections from Jack Copeland’s
Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction, Margaret Boden’s
AI: Its Nature and Future, and Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig’s
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, among other works.
Instructors:
Suman Ganguli,
Frank Shepard
Suman Ganguli earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University, where his studies focused on mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. He is an adjunct instructor in mathematics at New York City College of Technology and has dabbled in various areas of applied mathematics, including computational biology, quantitative finance, and most recently, data mining.
Frank Shepard holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil in philosophy of religion from Columbia University, an M.T.S. from Harvard, an M.A. in the social sciences from the University of Chicago, and an A.B. in religion from Princeton. His broader academic focus is on the philosophical and social scientific uses of probabilistic thinking. At present, Frank works full-time as a software engineer and serves as part-time faculty at Eugene Lang College in New York City.
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