HSCI-237: Philosophy & Ethics of AI

This course invites students to grapple with the most urgent philosophical questions surrounding artificial intelligence, which is actively reshaping what it means to make, think, and be human. Beginning with the question of whether AI systems can be conscious and what we would owe them if they were, the course moves through a series of interconnected debates. Does AI genuinely understand the world, or is it an extraordinarily sophisticated mirror of human output? Can human values - messy, contradictory, and deeply contextual - ever be faithfully encoded into a machine? Who bears responsibility when AI causes harm? Drawing on contemporary thinkers from diverse cultural backgrounds and following current debates, students will examine how AI challenges our assumptions about authorship, authenticity, and creative agency. We will further look at questions of AI alignment with human values. The course also confronts the political and material realities behind AI: the exploited labor, the concentrated power, the present harms to marginalized communities that tend to get overshadowed by speculation about distant futures. Rather than treating AI as something that happens to artists, this course asks students to position themselves as active participants in the philosophical and cultural conversation about what AI should become and who gets to decide.