What do we actually mean by utopia and dystopia — and who gets to decide which one we are living in?
Is Technology Our Savior — or Our Slayer?
Ruha Benjamin · TEDBenjamin refuses both scripts. Her argument is that the real question is not whether technology saves us or destroys us, but who holds the power to decide — which is the question this whole course is built on.
What Earth in 2125 could look like
Iseult Gillespie · TED-EdUnder five minutes and openly speculative. We watch it right before the AI Aftermath Scenarios activity — it is raw material for your own thinking, not a prediction to accept.
Narrow AI, AGI, superintelligence — and the Vulnerable World Hypothesis.
What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?
Nick Bostrom · TEDBostrom wrote the Vulnerable World Hypothesis we study this week, and he walks the narrow → general → super progression in exactly the order we do.
This Canadian Genius Created Modern AI
Geoffrey Hinton profileA short origin story for the technology, told through the person who built it. Useful background if the timeline feels abstract.
Persuasion, attention and influence. This class ends in a structured debate — watch Schmidt before you arrive.
Why AI Is Our Ultimate Test and Greatest Invitation
Tristan Harris · TEDHarris spent his career on attention capture and persuasive design. His case is that we already failed this exact test once, with social media.
The AI Revolution Is Underhyped
Eric Schmidt · TEDThe opposite position, argued by a former Google CEO: we are systematically underestimating both the pace and the upside. You will be asked to argue one side of this — so come having watched it.
I quit social media — here's what happened
Gabriela Nguyen · TEDxA student describing her own withdrawal. Her conclusion is harder than the usual detox advice: deleting the account is a start, not an answer.
Privacy, digital footprints, and one fully worked case of ethical failure.
Why privacy matters
Glenn Greenwald · TEDThe definitive answer to "I have nothing to hide." Greenwald's key move is separating being watched from knowing you are watched — and that distinction is what drives our digital footprint activity.
This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like
Carole Cadwalladr · TEDCadwalladr broke the Cambridge Analytica story. This is our Ethical Failure Analysis case: a named company, a named harm, and a journalist who paid a real price for reporting it.
Jobs, inequality, and what "the future of work" actually means for your field.
On The Future of Work in the Age of AI
Demis Hassabis · Google DeepMindHassabis argues from inside the lab building the technology, not from the commentary around it. Watch for where he hedges — that is usually the most informative part.
Daniela Amodei on responsible AI
Anthropic co-founderHow a company decides what it will and will not build. Useful if your presentation touches corporate responsibility.
Two experts, one question, opposite answers — and this time the subject of the argument is you.
How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education
Sal Khan · TEDKhan's claim: personal tutoring finally scales to everyone, and AI writes with you rather than for you.
Is AI making us dumber? Maybe.
Charlie Gedeon · TEDxGedeon is a UX designer. His argument is that his entire profession exists to remove effort — and effort is exactly where learning happens. He contradicts Khan using the same evidence.
You design a society this week. This is the one talk in the course about building rather than warning.
With Spatial Intelligence, AI Will Understand the Real World
Fei-Fei Li · TEDLi opens 540 million years ago, in a world that had light but no sight, and builds forward from there. A model of constructive argument you can borrow for your own design.
Technology, the body, and who gets access to a cure.
CRISPR's Next Advance Is Bigger Than You Think
Jennifer Doudna · TEDA Nobel laureate on editing the microbiome to reach disease and climate at once. Short, so we will have most of the hour left to argue about it.
Who owns the work a model learned from?
How AI Models Steal Creative Work — and What to Do About It
Ed Newton-Rex · TEDNewton-Rex walks the three inputs a model needs — people, compute, data — and shows that companies pay enormous sums for two of them and nothing at all for the third. He resigned from a major AI company over exactly this.
Company rules, national rivalry, and concentrated power. Watch LeCun beforehand.
Without guardrails, AI could be on a dangerous path
Dario Amodei · Anthropic CEOA chief executive arguing for regulation of his own industry. Ask yourself why someone would make that argument — the answer is the lesson.
AI competition between nations
Yann LeCun · Turing Award interviewMoves the question from company policy to state rivalry. If governance is your capstone angle, start here.
Broligarchs, AI and a Techno-Authoritarian Surveillance State
Carole Cadwalladr · The Daily ShowLooser and more polemical than her TED talk — a useful example of the same journalist changing register for a different audience.