AI and Society: A Critical Inquiry

AI and Society: A Critical Inquiry is a non-technical course examining the importance of human judgment and critical reflection in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and bidirectional digital media. From Kant’s questions about the nature and limits of human reason and judgment to Turing’s question of whether machines can think, the course explores enduring ideas about intelligence, consciousness, mind, reasoning, and rationality. Learners develop a conceptual understanding of how contemporary AI works, tracing key developments from early computation and symbolic AI to machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, and large language models. The course examines what these systems can and cannot do, and what their capabilities reveal (and do not reveal) about understanding, thought, and intelligence. It also considers how AI is reshaping learning, work, communication, culture, knowledge, and public life. Through readings, contemporary cases, dialogue, and critical reflection, learners examine issues such as truth, bias, privacy, power, governance, authorship, responsibility, cognitive offloading, and human agency. The central aim is to develop critical AI literacy: the capacity to question claims, evaluate evidence, recognize limitations and consequences, and exercise informed human judgment about when, why, and how AI should be used.