Readings

Readings are mainly available on Perusall, but are also linked here.

Week 1

Week 2

This week’s readings focus on technical background, history, perspectives, and possible futures.

  1. Large Language Models explained briefly - YouTube (8 minutes): An insightful big-picture summary of how LLMs work. Feel free to speed it up if you already have some background.
  2. Three AI Futures: This article in the most recent Communications of the ACM caught my eye because it gives a few different perspectives about AI. Each viewpoint is a caricature that’s missing some nuance, so feel free to disagree.
  3. Wikipedia article on the classic Licklider 1960 paper, Man-Computer Symbiosis, written at another moment of AI enthusiasm. What aged well? (I’ve included the full original paper in the Perusall library if anyone wants to read it, there’s some good quotes.)
  4. Welcome to the Era of Experience: this recent paper has helped shape my thinking recently: with scaling for mimicry tasks hitting a wall, the next major move will be learning from interaction. I’ll probably assign some related readings later: The Second Half – Shunyu Yao – 姚顺雨, The Era of Exploration | Yiding’s blog

If you haven’t yet, I also recommend the AI Fluency Foundations course; comment on that in the discussion forum.

Week 3

Week 4

This week’s readings juxtapose three perspectives on AI’s impact on work:

And two perspectives on AI’s impact on society:

In class I also referenced the following (optional):

Reading 5

Additional optional readings

Which of these readings should we incorporate in a future version of this course?

Miscellaneous interesting resources