Leveraging the Singularity: Introducing AI to Liberal Arts Students
James B. Marshall · 2008
In recent years, the notion that computers and robots will at-tain superhuman levels of intelligence in the next few dec-ades, ushering in a new “posthuman ” era in evolutionary history, has gained widespread attention among technology enthusiasts, thanks in part to books such as Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. This paper describes an introduc-tory-level AI course designed to examine this idea in an ob-jective way by exploring the field of AI as it currently is, in addition to what it might become in the future. An impor-tant goal of the course is to place these ideas within the broader context of human and cosmic evolution. The course is aimed at undergraduate liberal arts students with no prior background in science or engineering.