Artificial Intelligence: Logic, Ideology, and Power

It has become fashionable among the tech elite to sell hyperbolic, albeit vague, visions of AI-dominated futures, both near and very, very far. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—AI that achieves human-like intelligence—is imagined as the next milestone, with even more powerful Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) following soon after with exponential increases in intelligence. An age of “unlimited abundance” and human flourishing is said to hang in the balance—if, that is, ASI does not decide to eradicate humanity. Billionaires have seeded “AI Safety” institutes with the expressed aim of avoiding the latter. Utopian promises are peddled alongside warnings of existential risk (“xrisk”), both of which keep the consumer and investor laity in thrall. But already and increasingly, AI permeates much of the background activity of our daily lives in the form of narrowly-scoped Machine Learning (ML) models: from voice assistants and facial recognition to spam filters and movie recommendations. What are we actually talking about and interacting with when it comes to AI? And what justifies the most extreme, totalizing visions of AGI and ASI? Are any of these visions even possible, much less inevitable, imminent, or desirable?

In this class, we will interrogate the notion of AGI through historical, technical, philosophical, theoretical, social, and political lenses. How do generative AI chatbots and large language models (LLMs) work? How do digital systems represent the real world? What does it mean for us or a machine to know or to understand something? How do cognitive scientists and neuroscientists understand consciousness and intelligence? Do reasoning models reason? Why does the narrative of imminent AGI prevail when the preponderance of AI researchers do not believe it? Who are the figures most aggressively straining for more “powerful” AI, and why are so many of them motivated by a set of troubling ideologies—TESCREAL and e/acc—grounded in the logics of eugenics and colonialism? What can we expect the race for AGI to cost the rest of us? Readings will include works from computer and cognitive scientists as well as philosophers and other critics of technology including Alan Turing, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Weizenbaum, Donna Haraway, Ursula Franklin, Ruha Benjamin, Heather Douglas, Timnit Gebru, Émile P. Torres, Melanie Mitchell, Emily Bender, Alex Hanna, Abebe Birhane, Iris Van Rooij, Damien Williams, Jürgen Geuter, and Eryk Salvaggio.

“Artificial Intelligence: a Critical Introduction” will also run in-person at Hidden Door, on Mondays, starting July 6th. For more information, please visit the course page.

Course Schedule

Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
July 07 — July 28, 2026
4 weeks

$335.00

This class is completed. Check out our upcoming courses.