The audience for your essay is your classmates: people who have read and thought a little about the philosophy of artificial intelligence, but are not experts in the area. Thus, your essay should have a formal, academic tone, but need not give detailed explanations of concepts covered in our discussions.
Because this is our first writing assignment, some very specific requirements will be imposed to ensure you are acquiring the necessary techniques for college-level writing. Specifically, your essay must
The grading scheme for this assignment will be: 20% for the specific requirements listed above (italicizing thesis statement, topic sentences, and including quotations), and 80% for the style and content of the essay. The 80% for style and content will be assessed by awarding points in the following five categories: thesis statement; logical argument; clear, concise language; audience; critical analysis.
For this assignment, you are not required or expected to do research beyond the class readings. It is of course permissible to use other material (which must be correctly cited if used), but the maximum grade can be achieved by using only class readings. Future assignments will require citations from sources other than the class readings.
As stated in the syllabus, the essay must be between 2000 and 2500 words, including the bibliography in APA style.
In the feedback provided for Writing Assignment 1, there was a section called "technical writing issues". This consisted of a list of specific technical problems which you must locate and fix. Sometimes the problem occurred more than once and this repitition is indicated in parentheses. For example, "misused quotation marks (III)" means that quotation marks were misused three times. Sometimes, the appropriate section of A Writer's Reference is indicated to help you understand the error. For example, "misused quotation marks (WR, P6-g)" means you should consult section P6-g of A Writer's Reference.
In your list of technical fixes, you must list each of these identified technical writing issues, together with the original sentence in which the problem occurred, and a new sentence (or perhaps sentences) that fix the problem. For problems that occurred multiple times, you must provide the corresponding number of fixes. If the problem was described as "numerous", find and correct at least three instances. Please follow the formatting from the example provided, and list your fixes in exactly the same order that they occurred in the feedback.
Note that you must include a corrected version for every error, regardless of whether you plan to include the corrected version in the revised version of your essay.
Write a paragraph of between 100 and 300 words describing the revisions you have performed on your original essay. Do not list grammatical or technical changes (such as those in document 1 above). Rather, describe any changes you made to your thesis or the structure of your essay, any additions of new material or deletions of old material, and any other significant changes. Pay particular attention to describing how you addressed any concerns that were raised in the feedback from the first writing assignment.
This document is a revised version of your essay for Assignment 1. The question to be answered is the same as for Assignment 1, as is the audience and other details of the assignment. The only major difference is that the word limit has been altered: as stated in the syllabus, your essay for Assignment 2 must be between 2000 and 3000 words. (That is, the minimum word count is the same as for Assignment 1, but the maximum word count has been increased from 2500 to 3000.) Another difference is that the various specific requirements about italicizing certain sentences and including certain types of quotations will no longer be enforced. As with Assignment 1, there is no requirement to use sources outside the class readings.
The grade for this essay will depend in part on the absolute quality of the work but will also be strongly affected by the quality of your revisions. For example, an essay that received an A on Assignment 1 will receive a much lower grade on Assignment 2 unless it has been enhanced significantly by the revision process. If you received a B+ or better on Assignment 1, you should strongly consider adding some new material to ensure that your revisions produce a significant enhancement.
Choose one task, topic, or area in which artificial intelligence plays a role. Examples of possible topics include: chess and checkers; boardgames; computer games; art; music; architecture; humanoid robots; online chat-bots; movie special effects; medical diagnosis; surveillance; morality; military combat; driving or controlling vehicles such as cars, planes and space shuttles; recommendation systems such as those used by Netflix and Amazon; the works of a particular science fiction writer or writers; some combination of related science fiction movies and writing. Feel free to use one of these topics, or to choose one that is not on this list. Check with the instructor early on to verify that your choice of topic is suitable.
Write an essay applying the ideas from our class to the topic you have chosen. You may formulate your own thesis; the only restriction on the thesis is that your essay must use ideas from our class and cite several of our readings. You might consider formulating a thesis that answers the following question: is it possible, in principle, for machines to act or think like a human in your chosen area? But of course you can choose to address a different question as long as you use ideas from our class.
In addition, your essay must make use of research materials other than our class readings. A reasonable guideline would be to aim for a minimum of two scholarly articles and perhaps some popular sources also.
Do not fall into the trap of merely describing the capabilities of computers in your chosen area. Your essay should, of course, provide a brief survey of what computers are currently capable of doing in your area, but this should be at most half (and preferably less) of the content. The remainder must analyze the present and future capabilities of computers in your area using the philosophical ideas covered in our class.
As stated in the syllabus, your essay must be between 2500 and 4000 words, including a bibliography in APA format. The class schedule will list certain milestones to be completed, such as an annotated bibliography and a summary of your argument in our slide summarization format. These milestones will count as summarization homeworks and will be graded in the same way as our summarization homeworks: any reasonable attempt will receive full credit.