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Help building a curriculum on Narrative and Artificial Intelligence
by mk

A good friend of mine is a professor in the humanities, and is working on a curriculum for an upcoming course in Narrative and Artificial Intelligence. She queried a number of us for ideas, and I thought that Hubski might have some good suggestions that I could point her to.

These are the specifics:

    I’m working on a class I will teach next fall (assuming enough students enroll) and I would like your ideas, comments, and suggestions (see course description below). I’ll only have time to show about 10 movies if I’m lucky. So I’m interested in discussion about which 10 movies they should be, as well as ideas about other movies that wouldn’t necessarily make the cut, but could appear on the Final Project menu. I’m also looking for more readings and opinions about which readings should take priority. Thanks in advance for your thoughts. -B

    Narrative and Artificial Intelligence (HUMANITIES/open to First-years) Course Description Why do we tell so many stories about “robots?” Why are we most likely to represent artificial intelligence in the shape of a human? Why do so many “robot” narratives speculate about the possibility of machines acquiring emotion as part of artificial intelligence? What do recent popular film narratives reveal about the relationship between humans and technology? The genre of science fiction has considered variations on these questions for a long time. But perhaps most vividly, the intersection between science fiction and popular film shows where and how mass culture engages with these questions. In this course, we will consider these questions in relation to films and related readings.

    Tentative Film Schedule Metropolis 2001 Bladerunner Tron (which version?) Star Wars I Star Trek Second Gen. The Terminator I The Matrix I Battlestar Gallactica (episode or movie?) Wall-e

    Possible Readings: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Mechanic vs Organic Form” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art of Mechanical Reproduction” Isaac Asimov, I, Robot Ray Kurzweil Jason Silva NPR News /Radio Lab “real” world Robot Stories Individual Final Project Options: Films not on the class schedule Video Games (non-narrative?) Other related narrative constructs such as the vampire (mechanical reproducibility) or the psychopath (the inhuman human)

Thanks!