UNAS 3356 The Bridge Seminar: Interdisciplinary Integration and the Crises of the Twenty-First Century

The twenty-first century is being shaped by a series of technological revolutions that are transforming nearly every aspect of human life. From electrification to the internet to generative artificial intelligence, new technologies have altered how we work, communicate, govern, and understand ourselves. Yet these transformations also raise pressing questions that no single discipline can answer. How can technological innovation be reconciled with environmental sustainability? Why has unprecedented digital connectivity often produced loneliness, polarization, and inequality? How should organizations, communities, and individuals exercise sound judgment in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence? This seminar explores these questions through the practice of bridge thinking, or thinking that integrates the humanities, management, and sciences. Together, we will examine the hard problems raised by three significant general-purpose technologies that have disrupted and transformed society: electricity, the internet, and generative AI.We will use these complex problems, along with relevant historical cases and theoretical frameworks, to build skills for navigating our changing world. Throughout the semester, we will use the concepts of the three Cs, combination, connection, and collision, as lenses for understanding how technological change occurs, how innovations spread, and why they often produce unexpected consequences. We will explore the collision of technology and society with the rise of electrification and resulting environmental externalities. We will examine the combination of technical and organizational regimes in developing the internet and the high-tech economy, combining unprecedented social connection with high levels of loneliness and social division. And we will critically investigate the ongoing transformation of our social connections brought about by generative AI in the classroom, in future careers, and in local and global communities. Following the Catholic intellectual tradition, we will reflect on how these disruptions have raised ethical and epistemological questions and develop our own clear-eyed, well-researched recommendations for the future. Rather than treating bridge thinking as an abstract ideal, this course approaches it as a practical habit of mind. Through seminar-style discussion, case analyses, collaborative projects, and policy design, students will learn to integrate multiple forms of knowledge, exercise sound judgment amid uncertainty, and become well-rounded bridge thinkers ready to set the world aflame.