Media Society and Culture

Table of Contents Introduction Act One: AI as Metaphor and Speculative Frame for Procedural Automation (1980s–1990s) From Laboratories to Everyday Life Cultural Imagination: Between Utopian and Dystopian Frames Act Two: The Machine Learning Turn (Mid 1990s–2000s) Agentic Shift From Static Programs to Adaptive Algorithms Illustrative Example: A Machine-Learning Wardrobe Recommender Paradoxes of Machine Learning Footnotes Scene from the 1983 sci-fi thriller WarGames, directed by John Badham. The film dramatizes a near-catastrophe triggered by a military decision to entrust U.S. nuclear deterrence to an autonomous AI system that treats thermonuclear war as a solvable optimization problem. Source: DVDXtras, “WarGames (1983) | Behind the Scenes,” Internet Archive, June 2, 2022. <LINK> *Continuing from: “What Is AI?” Part 1: A Survey of Imaginaries, Mythologies, and Rhetorical Structures of Thinking Machines In the previous segment of our genealogical survey, we have traced ancient imaginaries that seeded today’s visions of machine intelligence. From Yan Shi’s mechanical performers to Talos’ bronze vigilance and the ritual logic of golems and Homunculi, we explored how mythic prototypes shaped the rhetorical terrain on which “AI” would later emerge as a technological category. Whereas earlier societies used myth and ritual to make sense of uncanny forms of artificial agency and “thinking machines,” in this second part we turn from historical mythologies to present-day technological possibilities. The term “artificial intelligence” circulates in our cultural lifeworld with astonishing fluidity. It appears in commercials, policy reports, sci-fi movies, legal disputes, and everyday conversations. It is used to describe everything from basic computer programs to sophisticated generative models capable of complex knowledge-performance. ...

*Online lesson module and WIP chapter draft. Table of Contents Introduction Yan Shi's Automata Talos Golem Faust’s Homunculus The Long Arc of Artificial Imaginaries Footnotes When our own era proclaims artificial intelligence (AI) as the centerpiece of contemporary technological fetishism, it often points to its sweeping impact on medicine, autonomous mobility, creative production, and the evolving rituals of law and civic life. Yet even amid these transformations, we should resist the impulse to treat AI as a clean break with the past, for the imaginaries that animate it are far older than the machines themselves.1 Long before the first integrated circuit pulsed with electricity, societies from the past contemplated thinking machines in forms that now read like allegories of our contemporary anxieties. ...

Course: Media, Culture & Society 1. Introduction: Why Study the Internet Historically The Internet is not a naturally occurring technology, rather, it is a profoundly human artifact. To understand its current social and political implications, we must trace its origins to the Cold War, where the fear of nuclear mutual annihilation became the unlikely seedbed for the invention of the Internet. In this module, we will explore how military exigencies, scientific collaboration, and ideological visions of freedom and control intertwined to produce today’s Internet infrastructure. By the end of this lesson, you should be able to explain how rhetorical, political, and technological forces co-evolved in shaping the Internet’s materiality and discursive characteristics. ...

 Table of Contents What Do You See? Historical "Thickness" of Advertising Demonstrative and Associative Ads Advertising & Consumer Psychology Bandwagon & Anti-Bandwagon Effects Social Marketing & Exploitation Computational Rhetoric of Hyper-Personalization What Do You See? Let’s begin today’s lesson with a quick glance at these sets of images. What do they remind you of? ...