Human-Centered AI major in ARHU News
October 29, 2026
Interview with Fabrizio in "Timely & Timeless".
Recently the College of Arts and Humanities published a Year in Review issue of its magazine, Timely & Timeless, including on pages 6-7 a feature on the new Human Centered AI Major, directed by Eric. The article is built on an interview with Fabrizio "about what it means to study AI from a humanities perspective [...] and what students can gain from the new major," building on his experience teaching AI and the Human Experience. It also includes a photo of President Pines visiting Robert Ragsdale's course on AI and Ethics, Philosophy 211, whose course description is below.
An introduction to a major subfield of contemporary Philosophy, namely applied ethics, and the experience of using some major tools in the practice of philosophy more generally, namely, the construction and formal evaluation of arguments, conceptual analysis, the use of thought experiments, and clear, direct and persuasive writing. Learning how to execute the latter will involve an intense iterative process. The substantive focus of the course will be the ethical evaluation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in some of its current and potentially future incarnations. We'll examine algorithmic opacity, algorithmic bias and decision-making, autonomous weapons systems, human-robot interaction, and artificial moral agents, in order to uncover what, if any, ethical issues they give rise to.