HSOC2421 - Manufacturing Minds: From Babbage to ChatGPT

When asked to tell its own history, ChatGPT answers literally, describing (vaguely of course) its own training data set. When pressed to describe the longer history of “technology like you,” it mentions early computer science, programs that played chess or solved math problems, before naming deep learning algorithms and big data as the key breakthroughs. This lineage is not untrue, but it ignores the wider context in which individuals and organizations have come to pursue this strange dream of crafting an intelligent object. As an uncannily lucid conversation partner who freely performs all manner of textual tasks, ChatGPT participates in a longstanding tension in the history of information technology between the goals of manufacturing minds and making mindless clerical workers. In this course we historicize that tension in three domains—calculation, knowledge work, and games—all of which directly inform our efforts to imagine what ChatGPT and its ilk might be. Throughout, we will attend to the ways machinery shaped specific tasks’ construction in relation to gender, race, and class identities. We will see how technologies often imagined as disembodied are always material, interacting with human bodies and physical environments.