Reflection and Synthesis
This is the last meeting of the semester. No reading. Bring yourself and the fourteen weeks you have just lived through.
Your final-project video is also due today. If you haven't submitted yours yet, head to the final-project video page and paste your YouTube link there. We caption every submission automatically.
Before tomorrow, please complete the preparation conversation below. It walks through two of the three rounds we'll do in class — what worked, what should change, what was missing. The third round (a personal retrospective) is intentionally left fresh for the room.
Preparation Discussion
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Today's Plan
Three rounds of paired discussion with new partners each round. The first is a quick personal retrospective: what changed in you, and what does flourishing alongside AI look like for you now? The second and third are about the course itself. You are the only people in the room who actually took it. We are going to use that.
The conversations in Rounds 2 and 3 are agent-guided so the feedback gets captured. What you say will shape the next version of this course.
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Log InRound 1: What Changed in You?
This activity involves working with a partner.
What Changed in You?
You walked into this room in January with some set of assumptions about AI. Maybe you thought the hype was overblown, or that AGI was around the corner, or that ChatGPT was magic, or that none of it really mattered for your major. Fourteen weeks later, you have used these tools weekly in labs, read journalism that took the technology seriously and skeptically, and learned the actual mechanisms — next-token prediction, RLHF, embeddings, scaling, mixture of experts — that produce the outputs you see on the screen.
Last Tuesday we sat with three sharp arguments: Sun on the specificity of a life, Shroff on who pays when the bubble bursts, Pollan on the consciousness gap underneath the AGI promise. You do not have to have settled any of them.
Discuss with your partner. Compared to who you were in January, what do you believe about AI now that you didn't then? What is one belief that shifted — toward more skepticism, more enthusiasm, more nuance, more confusion?
Then go forward, not backward. What does flourishing alongside AI actually look like for you? Be specific to your life: when will you reach for these tools, and when won't you? What rule are you going to set for yourself? What does using AI well — for your goals, your work, your relationships — actually mean now that you know how it works?
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Round 1: Share Out
Share Out
Geoff will ask a few pairs to share what they discussed. Listen for ideas that challenge or extend your own thinking.
Round 2: What This Course Got Right
This activity involves working with a partner.
What This Course Got Right
This course was built on a set of bets. That you do not need a CS background to think clearly about AI. That AI should be examined critically, not celebrated. That conversations work better than lectures. That you learn AI by using it (creative media, study guides, data analysis, websites, your final project). That AI itself can be part of the course — preparation chats before discussions, agent-guided synthesis during them, a course site that is itself human-AI collaboration.
Some of those bets paid off. Some did not. You are the only people in the room who can say which.
Discuss with your partner. Which bets paid off for you? Push past "I liked the discussions." Which discussion? What did it do that a lecture wouldn't have? Was there a lab where you noticed yourself learning something you couldn't have learned by reading? A reading that hit harder than expected? A moment where the agent-guided format actually changed what you said? Be specific.
Then push to the bet underneath: what about the design made it work? That is the part that needs to survive into next year.
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Round 2: Share Out
Share Out
Geoff will ask a few pairs to share what they discussed. Listen for ideas that challenge or extend your own thinking.
Round 3: What Should Change
This activity involves working with a partner.
What Should Change
You are the next instructor designing this course. You have to make it better than the version you just took. What do you do?
Discuss with your partner. What do you cut? What do you add? What is in the course but in the wrong shape — the right idea executed badly, or the wrong amount, or the wrong timing? What is missing entirely — a topic the course never touched, a format you never got to try, an experience you wished you had?
Push past surface complaints. "Less reading" is a complaint; "fewer readings paired more tightly with one sharp question per meeting" is a redesign. "More labs" is a wish; "an extra lab on X, cutting Y to make room" is a trade. The next instructor needs trades, not wishes.
The hardest and most useful question: what did the course never talk about that it should have?
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Round 3: Share Out + Closing
Share Out and Close
Geoff will ask a few pairs to share what they discussed, then close the semester.