ADSO 2200 Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Sociological Imagination

What does Artificial Intelligence (AI) have to do with sociology? In this course, students will use their sociological imagination to critically examine the development, deployment, and social impact of AI technologies. Far from being neutral or purely technical tools, AI systems reflect and reproduce the values, structures, and inequalities of the societies that create them. Through the lens of classical and contemporary sociological theories, students will examine how AI intersects with key social institutions, including labor, education, healthcare, policing, and media. We will also investigate how AI is shaped by and contributes to systems of power, including race, class, gender, and global inequality. Topics will include algorithmic bias, surveillance, automation and labor, data capitalism, and the social construction of technology. Students will learn to analyze AI not just as a technological phenomenon, but as a profoundly social one. They will ask critical questions about who designs these systems, who is affected by them, and what visions of the future they make possible. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to understand and critically examine AI as both a product and a producer of society.