Alan Turing: The Life and Work of AI's First Visionary

More than nearly anybody else, we owe our computers to Alan Turing. In this course, we will learn about Turing's life and work. We will pay special attention to his article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Here, Turing argues for the possibility of 'intelligent machinery', or what we would now call artificial intelligence. Have large language models such as ChatGPT fulfilled Turing's vision? Are they a step on the way toward that vision? Or was Turing fundamentally misguided in his predictions? No knowledge of coding or computer science is required for this course, but students will do some simple coding exercises.

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:

4 - Philosophy of Mind