Think at civilization scale

Let me be direct about where this seminar begins: with the assumption that you are already frustrated.

You are frustrated because the dominant public conversation about artificial intelligence — even the serious, credentialed parts of it — keeps returning to the same narrow frame. Productivity. Labor displacement. GDP. These are real concerns, and they are not nothing. But if you have spent time working at the intersection of global health systems, economic development, security policy, or democratic governance, you already sense that this frame is doing enormous intellectual damage. It is treating a civilizational inflection point as though it were a slightly unusual technology cycle. It is not.

That is the problem this seminar was built to address. The curriculum takes seriously what the productivity debate systematically misses: that AI is already reshaping the biological parameters of human lifespan, that autonomous weapons systems are straining international humanitarian law at precisely the moment great-power competition is heating up, that the between-country inequality implications of AI diffusion may be as consequential as the within-country ones, and that the second- and third-order effects on democratic legitimacy, human agency, and state sovereignty are barely in view in mainstream policy analysis. These are not speculative edge cases. They are the terrain this seminar is built to map.

The method here is interdisciplinary in a genuine sense — not the kind where disciplines are cited as decoration, but the kind where you are expected to hold a macroeconomic growth model and a bioethics argument in the same analytical frame and know how to adjudicate between them. You will work with futures methodology and scenario planning. You will engage competing accounts of autonomous conflict and algorithmic warfare doctrine. You will examine AI governance architectures — treaties, standards bodies, national strategies — not as finished solutions but as live sites of contestation. And you will do this with evidence, not assertion.

I should tell you what this seminar is not. It is not a technology optimism course. It is not an AI doomerism course either. It is a course in rigorous, multi-domain analysis of a phenomenon whose full consequences will take decades to unfold. The appropriate intellectual posture is neither enthusiasm nor alarm — it is precision. The capstone reflects this: you will construct and defend an original policy position or research argument, with a clear causal logic and an honest account of the normative stakes. That kind of intellectual accountability is what I ask of you, and it is what this seminar is designed to develop.

If you are a graduate student, doctoral researcher, policy analyst, or senior professional who wants to think at the scale the moment actually requires — this is where that work begins. I look forward to the argument.