HIST 01S26 - 2034: Living with A.I in the Post-Modern World
Course Description
2034: Living with A.I. in the Post-Modern World
This two-part seminar examines the lived realities, risks, and responsibilities that follow decades of embedded artificial intelligence. Using a historian’s lens on technological change, the series traces the timeline that reshaped information sharing, government, finance, education, medicine, and military affairs, and surfaces the ethical, social, and policy dilemmas created by powerful, ubiquitous AI systems.
Participants will interrogate competing claims about control and inevitability — can governance, design, and public deliberation meaningfully “put the genie back in the bottle,” or must we build robust strategies to live with and manage novel forms of risk? Combining narrative case studies, historical timelines, and contemporary policy debate, the seminar gives attendees a conceptual framework and practical tools for assessing AI’s benefits and harms and for advocating safer, more equitable technology pathways.
Fri. 3/6-3/13 3-4 pm Campus: CYC Room 111
Instructor: Dr. John Williams Sessions: 2
Dr. John P. Williams is a full-time Professor at Collin Colleges McKinney Campus. Prior to his teaching career, he worked in the corporate world as an information analyst and served in the United State Marine Corps. Dr. Williams’s educational background includes an A.A. degree in Paralegal Studies, a B.A. degree in History, an M.A. in Teaching, and a master’s in liberal arts. He finished his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2020, which focused on Immigration to America, the First World War and the Lost Generation, and Nazi Germany and Holocaust. Currently, he is working on his first book and hopes to have it published in the near future.