Advanced Topics in Asian Languages and Cultures (390-0-20)

Topic

Before AI: Cybernetics Global E Asia

Instructors

Dahye Kim
847/491-1350
1880 Campus Drive, Kresge 4-441
Office Hours: varies by quarter, please contact instructor

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-343: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

AY26-27. In 1983, Edward Feigenbaum, a renowned computer scientist at Stanford, and journalist Pamela McCorduck warned that Japan's Fifth Generation Computer project posed a challenge to American technological leadership and perhaps to the future of artificial intelligence itself. A few years later, Japan studies scholar and linguist Marshall J. Unger called much of this vision a "fifth generation fallacy," arguing that Japan's heavy investment in AI was inseparable from the distinctive challenges that East Asian writing systems posed in digital environments, as well as from the retraining of its population in preparation for the information age. This course begins from that geopolitical tension and its historicity: today's AI discourse has a long genealogy that reveals the social, political, and cultural nature of technology and media infrastructure. AI has never been only about whether machines can think. With its very definition and underlying assumptions, including what exactly counts as intelligence, changing across different times and places, its longer global history opens up space for critical inquiry into how culture, politics, and different forms of body politics are constitutive of technologies.
Today's artificial intelligence—more specifically, the large language models that have come to dominate public discussion of AI—is often presented as a radically new technology transforming labor, writing, and everyday life. With its focus on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century history of global technoscientific modernity, this course encourages students to take a historicizing view. Rather than beginning with contemporary AI systems, it places them within longer histories of cybernetics, automation, writing, and computation, with particular, though not exclusive, attention to East Asia. Drawing on plural, global histories of AI, cybernetics, and media technologies that resist technological determinism, the course is designed to help students develop critical literacy through readings in critical media studies, science and technology studies, the history of science and technology, and East Asian studies.

Registration Requirements

Students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds are welcome. The course is intended for students who are prepared to engage closely with theoretical and humanities-based readings and to participate actively in seminar discussion.

Teaching Method

This upper-level course is discussion-based, complemented by short lectures as needed.

Evaluation Method

Evaluation will include active participation in class discussion. Graduate students will complete additional readings and are expected to take a more active role in leading discussion. The course will also include writing assignments that require close and sustained analysis of course texts. Specific assignment formats and grading criteria are TBA.

Class Materials (Required)

Required readings will be available on Canvas. Students may also be asked to purchase or rent access to a small number of films, no more than two or three over the course of the quarter.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity
SoC Additional Distro