TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
What is technology? What is culture? What is natural, and what is artificial? Can what it means to be 'human' be defined without these ideas? Is being human necessarily also being 'technological'? Does it mean belonging to a culture? Is what humans make necessarily artificial? If humans are natural, then isn't our technology natural, too? Does technological advancement necessarily mean cultural advancement, or perhaps the opposite? Do advances in technology help humans to progress, or actually regress? These and other challenging questions will be explored in this course using ancient, modern and contemporary sources. If you want to figure out what AI is really all about, or what our assumptions are and how to understand our relationship to both technology and culture throughout history and in the world today, then this is the course for you!
(A 'Personalized ESL' component may be added as well.)