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About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-20 0
In 1812 the British Parliament made breaking a textile machine a crime punishable by death. The workers it targeted were not against machines as such; they were angry about who was gaining from them and who was paying. Two centuries later the same argument is running again, now over software that scores loan applicants, feeds tuned to hold our attention, and chatbots that write fluently and sometimes invent their sources.
You will look at whether a technology can carry politics in its design, how bias slips into algorithms and why no system can meet every definition of fairness at once, what automation has actually done to jobs, how large language models work, and where experts disagree about AI risk. Each debate is laid out as its strongest defenders would put it. The goal is a set of questions you can bring to any new device or policy: who benefits, who bears the costs, and who gets to decide.
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