This course prepares students to navigate an era of accelerating technological change with clarity, wisdom, and confidence. Artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, and other emerging technologies hold extraordinary promise. They may help us cure disease, expand human creativity, solve pressing global challenges, and unlock possibilities that were unimaginable just a generation ago. At the same time, these enormously powerful technologies also carry enormous risks. If we are not thoughtful about how we use these tools, they may diminish the very capacities they are meant to enhance—from our attention and critical thinking to our relationships, creativity, and sense of agency. Rather than reacting to sensational headlines or simplistic predictions, students in this course develop a grounded understanding of today’s most transformative technologies and learn how to build a healthy, empowering relationship with them.
Students explore:
- How today’s most transformative technologies work and why they are advancing so rapidly
- The extraordinary opportunities—and the potential dangers—they present for individuals, society, and the planet
- How to cultivate a healthy, empowering relationship with emerging technologies
- How to use AI creatively to transform ideas into meaningful projects
In every class, we combine big-picture thinking with hands-on experimentation. Each student chooses a project of personal significance and experiments with using AI as a creative collaborator. By working directly with today’s most capable AI systems, students develop practical skills while also reflecting on a deeper question: How can we harness increasingly powerful technologies in ways that amplify, rather than diminish, our humanity?
A Deeper Dive
Technological change is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, yet much of the public conversation remains polarized between utopian promises and catastrophic warnings. Some foresee a future of unprecedented abundance, where new technologies cure disease, eliminate scarcity, and free humanity from routine labor. Others anticipate widespread job displacement, dangerous new weapons, the concentration of power, or even the emergence of systems beyond human control. This course equips students to move beyond simplistic narratives by developing nuanced maps of the many possible futures and actively orienting toward the most likely—and the most life-giving—among them.
We begin by building an accessible understanding of today’s most transformative technologies, with artificial intelligence serving as our primary case study. Students explore why AI has advanced so rapidly, how it works, and how it relates to other accelerating fields such as robotics, biotechnology, and automation. From there, we examine how these technologies may transform education, science, government, business, the arts, and everyday life. Students learn to think in possibilities rather than predictions, recognizing that the future will be shaped not only by technological breakthroughs but also by the countless choices individuals, institutions, and societies make along the way.
A central theme of the course is the paradox of empowerment. Every powerful technology expands human capability while also carrying the risk of diminishing the capacities it replaces. Calculators changed the way we relate to arithmetic for both good and bad; GPS did the same for navigation. Artificial intelligence raises this issue at a far deeper level. As these systems become capable of increasingly complex cognitive tasks, how do we ensure they strengthen rather than weaken our own critical thinking, creativity, and moral clarity? More broadly, how do we cultivate technologies that enrich rather than erode what it means to be human? Students explore practical habits for using AI as an amplifier of human intelligence rather than a substitute for it.
Throughout the course, theory is continually paired with practice. Each student undertakes a substantial AI-assisted project that begins with a personal vision and culminates in the creation of something genuinely new. The goal of this project is to help students discover the kind of relationship they want to cultivate with the powerful technologies that are rapidly becoming woven into everyday life. Our hope is that students leave with a realistic understanding of these technologies’ possibilities and limitations, a practical set of tools they can use immediately, and a deeper sense of agency as they prepare for a future that is still being written.
Course Content
Course Includes
- 1 Class
