OLLI101724 - AI Through the Lens of Philosophy 

Course Description

AI Through the Lens of Philosophy 

Instructor: William Dowling 

Days of the Week: Wednesday 

Date: Feb. 4 – Mar. 18 (6 sessions) 

Time:  1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. 

Location: In-person at TUCC 

This course explores philosophical questions—ancient and modern—through the lens of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. Students examine topics in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics, including the nature of knowledge and truth, the existence of abstractions like numbers, and questions of moral duty and how we ought to live. The course begins with an introduction to accessing and using LLMs, then applies classical philosophical frameworks to contemporary issues in a digital age. 

Maximum: 45 

Instructor Bio: William (Will) Dowling holds an AB in Linguistics from Princeton University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught mathematics and computer science at Drexel University and later worked in industry at the intersection of natural language processing and data architecture. Now retired from Elsevier, where he served as a data scientist, he continues to consult on applications of LLMs in the medical field.