Edu Ex Machina

This spring, I took a class on the history of AI. I chose it not so much for its subject matter but for one of the instructors, an intellectual historian with a following of Europhile undergrads, whose entourage I had been hoping to infiltrate. In this class, marketed as “experimental” and “interdisciplinary” and team-taught by the historian and a heavy hitter from computer science, I found myself unusually far outside my wheelhouse of women’s history. We read science fiction and historiography; Kant, Valéry, Popper and Project 2025. A screening of Ex Machina broke up a week when we’d been assigned several unpublished CS working papers. No word in the semantic family of AI was left unparsed—“intelligence,” “machine,” “large”—you name it.