Aaron Reeves

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Economy and Society, MSc in Inequalities and Social Science, MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Sociology. This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

This course has a limited number of places. For information on how to apply for a place on this course, please see Courses offered and related information.

This course is motivated by a big question: How can societies deploy AI in ways that benefit all?

AI has already had a huge impact on how millions of people are living their lives and yet we are only just starting to understand both the impacts of AI and who benefits from these new technologies.

This course is designed to give you the time, space, and resources to develop an answer to this big question. Your ideas matter because this a space in which there are live intellectual debates happening right now. While we do not have all the answers to this question, there are some issues on which there is a degree of consensus. It has become increasingly clear that AI will have harmful environmental impacts and that these tools draw on discriminatory language and practices that are contained in the training data. But these implications are not fixed and there are efforts to both reduce the environmental effects and to minimise the potentially discriminatory aspects of these tools. This course is concerned with how AI is being used and with trying to understand how to actually deploy AI in practice. This means we will not only think about AI but we will also use it in class to try to see how it works. In doing this, we will spend time critically reflecting on how these tools may remake the social world across a number of different areas, including: the environment, technology, processes of exploitation, racialised or gendered classification, work, politics, and regulation. We also situate AI in its historical context and consider what might happen in the future.

25 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Teaching on this course includes practical seminar activities. Students will therefore need to bring a compatible laptop to seminars. Tablets and Chromebooks cannot be used, as they are not compatible with the software requirements of the course.

Essay (1000 words).

The formative essay will be a critical analysis of an essay produced using AI.

O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Penguin Random House USA Ex, 2016.

Hidalgo, César A., Diana Orghian, Jordi Albo Canals, Filipa de Almeida, and Natalia Martin. How Humans Judge Machines. The MIT Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/13373.001.0001.

Hofmann, Valentin, Pratyusha Ria Kalluri, Dan Jurafsky, and Sharese King. ‘AI Generates Covertly Racist Decisions about People Based on Their Dialect’. Nature 633, no. 8028 (2024): 147–54. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07856-5.

Muldoon, James, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant. Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI. Canongate Books, 2024.

Christian, Brian, and Tom Griffiths. Algorithms to Live by: The Computer Science of Human Decisions. Henry Holt & Company, 2016.

Olson, Parmy. Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World. Macmillan Business, 2024.

Essay (100%, 2000 words) in May.

Attendance at all seminars and submission of all set coursework is required.