Course Objective: This course focuses on socio-technical problems caused by humanity blindly stumbling its way into the Information Age. Our new world has new rules: intellectual property looks different, cyber-crime looms large, cold cyber-warfare persists at a nation-state level, planet-scale surveillance is commonplace, we’re all about to lose our jobs to robots, and the list goes on.
We shall study the rise of fake news and nation-state propaganda, the nature of sensitive information and the importance of privacy, and the deeper structural issues (such as the nature of the internet, the laws of scale, and the direction of technological progress, especially in AI) that underlie many of our problems. We will also spend significant time understanding how these issues affect our political processes (and how personal autonomy and ”consent” are affected). Some background in graph theory will be helpful (though not required).
While this course shall be interesting for computer science experts and non-experts alike, we’ll hold extra sessions for non-expert students: you should be willing to get their hands dirty! Students will also be expected to do some background reading on the history of the internet, cyber-crime, etc.
Note that this will be a HARD course (I will be teaching at a graduate level), and you will be dealing with ill-defined real-world problems with missing information.
Pre-requisite: None.
Coverage: The syllabus is broken into five “theses”:
1. Resources: Humans, Money, and Material (includes data)
2. Control: Propaganda, Surveillance, Crimes, War
3. Flow: Structure of the Internet and Sensitive Information
4. Delusion: Presence is Power. Understanding cultural heritage and identity
5. Robots: Is AI going to take over the world?
We will be looking at all of these topics through a technical lens, and it is expected that students will use their own backgrounds and experiences to enrich these conversations. Think about how you might add to the discussion if we discuss how China is using AI in Xinjiang (or the COMPAS system used for bail applications in NY). For example, sessions on ‘media’ will involve graph theoretic analysis of media sources (Redmiles, Rand).
You should have a more nuanced, wider, and deeper understanding of the interplay between computing and human society and its many facets, from the economics and supply chains involved, to elections and propaganda, to individual-level behavioral changes.
References: Only long readings are mentioned here; there will be numerous shorter articles
posted weekly.
• Bernays; Propaganda
• Shambaugh; China’s Propaganda System: Institutions, Processes and Efficacy
• Zuboff; The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
• Levine; Surveillance Valley
• Graeber; Bullshit Jobs
• Gray; Ghost Work
• Work; US War Doctrine in the Robotic Age
• Johns; Piracy
• Shaxson; Treasure Islands
