Syllabus (Spring 2026)

This is a syllabus made for Cornell Info Sci Spring 2026

This history class is non-chronological and layers themes and topics over a fixed time period (ca. 1940s ~ present) throughout. Most of it considers the 20th century but there are some bits of early modern content.

Each Friday class starts with a lecture, followed by a student group presentation and activities, and ends with discussion. Refer to assignments for further information.

Suggested reading list is here.

  • January 24th
    Week 1: Intro, how to define AI (for this class)?
    Course intro, types of AI, large paradigms in AI, course logistics, split into student groups, etc.

  • January 31st
    Week 2: Early Modern to Modern AI
    Ancient AI, automata, naturalism vs. mechanism, New Science, Turing, Dartmouth Conference, Cybernetics

  • February 7th
    ‍Week 3: AI & War
    ARPA/DARPA, defense funds, digital computers, surveillance AI, Microworlds, Stategic Computing Initiative, Man Computer Symbiosis

  • February 14th
    Week 4: Chatbots to Transformers
    ELIZA, SIRI, rule-based to probabilistic models, Information Retrieval, Expert Systems, Machine Translation, Deep Learning, Transformers

  • February 21st
    Week 5: AI in Silicon Valley and Beyond
    DeepMind, IBM, OpenAI, Google Brain & FAIR/Meta AI, Bell Labs

  • February 28th
    Week 6: Imagined AI
    AI scifi, forecasting & philosophy, Hal from 2001: Space Odyssey, Terminator, recent camps of thought on AI,Alignment Problem, Effective Altruism, "Stop-AI" Movement, "Superintelligence"

  • March 7th
    Week 7: Tale of Two AI's: Gaming and Health
    AlphaFold, AlphaGo, AI for game development, AI in health and medicine

  • March 14th
    Week 8: Hardware for AI 
    TSMC, Samsung, Nvidia, GPUs, TPUs, NPUs

  • March 21st
    Week 9: AI Algorithms
    Algorithm origins; computation, automation and algorithms, connectionism, perceptrons

  • March 28th
    Week 10: Midterms (!) due by midnight

  • April 11th
    Week 11: AI Ethics, Labelers, and Datasets
    Jobs, AI labelers in the global South, environmental issues, NIST mugshots, AlexNet, ImageNet, Benchmarks, Internet-Scale Data

  • April 18th
    Week 12: Generative AI, Agents, Consciousness
    Creativitiy, traditional "human" professional jobs, AGI

  • April 25th
    Week 13: Robots & Autonomous Vehicles
    Self driving cars, first humanoids, Japanese robots‍

  • May 2nd
    Week 14: AI Policy, Global Economics & the Future
    Brussels Effect in AI, human-level AI

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