When I taught this course last year, I said: > Like many others in the past year, the past week has been full of important events and announcements. The release of DeepSeek R1 brings reasoning to open source Large Language Models, while OpenAI leads a consortium building AI infrastructure at staggering scale.
By comparison, in 2026, we’ve had countless new releases of open source models, incremental releases by the major so-called “hyperscalers” - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google – and the arrival of agentic AI, in the form of products like OpenClaw and Anthropic’s Cowork Dispatch.
But how did we get here? In this first week, we discuss some of the history of Artificial Intelligence - a history that goes back much further than McCarthy’s seminal 1955 proposal in many ways. We will also discuss how this history is intimately connected with theories about education, learning and development. How we design computer systems to “think like us” builds upon ideas of who “we” are: how we reason, speak and use other information modalities.
If you only get to look at one or two readings, I’d suggest the first of the Cope & Kalantzis papers (2022), and the McCarthy et al. (2006/1955) proposal.
In future weeks we will fan out our interests to look at technical, philosophical, ethical and pedagogical dimensions of AI. Look forward to speaking with you soon.
Readings
Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. “Artificial intelligence in the long view: from mechanical intelligence to cyber-social systems.” Discover Artificial Intelligence 2, no. 1 (2022): 13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-022-00029-1.
Goodlad, Lauren ME, and Matthew Stone. “Beyond Chatbot-K: On large language models,“generative AI,” and rise of chatbots—An introduction.” Critical AI 2, no. 1 (2024). https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/article/doi/10.1215/2834703X-11205147/390862/Beyond-Chatbot-K-On-Large-Language-Models
LeCun, Yann, “Deep Learning Hardware: Past, Present, and Future,” IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2019:12-19. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8662396/
McCarthy, John, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon, “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence: August 31, 1955,” The AI Magazine 27: no. 4 (2006): 12-14. http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/dartmouth/dartmouth.pdf.
Schmidhuber, Juergen. “Annotated history of modern AI and deep learning.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.11279 (2022). https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-history.html
Additional
Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. “A little history of e-learning: finding new ways to learn in the PLATO computer education system, 1959–1976.” History of Education 52, no. 6 (2023): 905-936. doi.org
Crawford, Kate (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press, 2021.
Wooldridge, Michael. A brief history of artificial intelligence: what it is, where we are, and where we are going. Macmillan+ ORM, 2021.
McCarthy, John (2000). The Question of Artificial Intelligence. https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/bloomfield/bloomfield.html
Assignment(s):
In your respective Google Sheet tab, respond to one or more of Week 2’s questions:
Questions: what about the history of AI has interested you? Are you surprised with where things have arrived at? What is it you feel most needs saying about AI today?