Artificial Intelligence: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Course Leader: Tom Naps

Course Assistant: Anna Crittenden

Welcome to the course home page for the winter term OLLI course Artificial Intelligence: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. The course will meet via Zoom for five Fridays, 12:30-2:00, starting January 24. Feel to contact Tom Naps anytime you have questions or concerns about the course.

Course description from OLLI catalog: Recent advances in AI will change the relationship between humans and their technology. AI “agents” will become our new assistants, companions, confidantes, and influencers. But those same advances are also being eagerly sold to us by the internet giants so they don’t miss out on a perceived “gold rush.” The decisions we all make about the nature of AI’s involvement in our lives will determine the long-term effect AI has on each of us as individuals and on society at large. The better informed those decisions are, the less chance that we, our children, and our grandchildren will regret them.

Course outline

• Week 1: Turing’s imitation game left much unsaid. LLMs require a deeper look at the various roles that the players may take on. (Week 1 slides) (PDF version)
• Week 2: Bait and switch? The AI hype machine promises AGI, but aren’t we really getting GAI? The difference is important. So is the question of who gets to define that difference. (Week 2 slides) (PDF version)
• Week 3: Is AI the supernova of social media? AI is transforming social media as it enhances existing features and creates new possibilities. But with deepfakes, AI slop, and a lack of fact-checking, could the enhancements turn out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing? (Week 3 slides)
• Week 4: Creating, Remixing, Regurgitating, or Plagiarizing? Is AI a fair use fairy tale? (Week 4 slides)
• Week 5: Stop AI? There’s no way that will happen, the genie is out of the bottle. It needs to be steered, not stopped. That genie could do some great things for us in areas like health care and global warming if we (as in, “we the people”) provide the appropriate incentives and controls to get right the three wishes we give our genie. (Week 5 slides)

Slides for each week will be posted shortly before class.

Books for more in-depth exploration - links provided to reviews on GoodReads

These two are two very new 2024 publications and they have greatly influenced what I’ve decided to cover in this course. They get my highest recommendation.

• Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
• Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us by Gary F. Marcus

Some of these I’ve read in totality. Others I’ve only browsed but put them on my ever-expanding bucket list.

• The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Fei-fei Li
• The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian
• Unmaksing AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini
• The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman
• Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill
• God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’ Gieblyn
• Power And Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb
• Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Paul Scharre
• The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Nita A. Farahany
• Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson
• Intelligence and Spirit by Reza Negarestani
• AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor
• Power And Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb
• The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen

Some tips for using Zoom

• In case you’re not able to find the link that OLLI sent you to join the meeting, clicking this https://umn.zoom.us/j/94639819902 should get you there assuming that I have started the meeting.
• With so many participants in the class, we will mute all until discussion is opened at the end of the meeting. If you want to comment on something, please use the chat to type in your comment. Anna will be monitoring that during the meeting.
• Each class after about an hour of lecture, Anna will be opening breakout rooms where you and a small number of other participants will have a chance to discuss a “question of the day”. The breakout sessions will last about 10 minutes. This should allow enough time for all participants to share their perspective with others in their room.
• If you want to use closed captioning but it’s not appearing on your screen, you should be able to fix this by selecting the CC button on your Zoom controls and then enabling “view full transcript”.