HCST Course Offerings Spring 2026

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:14:42 -0500

Looking for interesting courses to add to your Spring schedule? Check out next semester's HCST Courses:

HCST 499/INDS 430

Robots, AI, and Transhumanists: Exploring the Uncanny Valley

Over the next one to two decades, humanity faces the prospect of having to share the planet with completely new and invented beings - robots, artificial intelligences, and humans who have begun to transform themselves into something other. The science and technology seem to be catching up with the heady dreams of sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. Through this course students will form a community of thinkers and experimenters that will engage with the complexities of living in this space. We will explore through discussion and doing what it is like to develop relationships with artificial intelligences and investigate the incursion of robots (e.g. delivery bots, robotaxis, and eldercare bots) into spaces traditionally reserved for humans. We will ask ourselves at what point, if ever, does the integration of technology into the human body transform that body into something that is beyond human. We will wonder together just how prepared are we to live in a world where sci-fi is no longer fiction?

Instructor: Eric Brown

TuTh 4:00PM - 5:15PM

HCST 100

The Human Context of Science and Technology

In this course, students explore interactions among the humanities, the sciences and technology, including study of the sciences and technology using humanistic approaches, and study of the effects of the sciences and technology on art, philosophy and society. Students will have the opportunity to consider the role of human values in the pursuit of the sciences and in the invention and employment of various technologies. Practical social and political issues relating to science and technology will also be addressed.

Instructor: Christopher Arledge

TuTh 11:30AM - 12:45PM