Long Paper Proposal
Your long paper proposal for our Artificial Intelligence course is due by Sunday, Oct. 29 at 11:59pm in your Google Doc. Your longer paper should be a project that is comparable in style, argument, and approach to the shorter papers we've written, and it should follow the "How to analyze a philosophical essay" for the department. But it should be longer and pursue a thesis in more depth and detail. Our previous papers have been approximately 800 words. This project should be in the range of 2,000 words. So you will need to pick a topic and pursue an argumentative thesis that is appropriate to that scope. The final version of this paper is due on Friday, Dec. 8 by 11:59 in your Google Doc.
Long Paper Proposal: The proposal/abstract for this project should be 250-500 words long. It should describe a particular issue or issue that you'd like to explore. It should raise several questions about the issue that you think are promising. And it should sketch out what might be some answers to those questions. You may present a specific argumentative thesis that you would like to explore, or you can present a few different possible positions that you could end up arguing for. You should make it clear how the position you are investigating fits into the literature we have been reading, or other relevant sources. You should describe why it's important to explore the issue and come to some sort of answer about it. And you should include a bibliography of at least 5 sources--journal articles, web articles, video lectures, etc.--that are relevant and that will inform your inquiry.
The proposal will be graded according to the degree to which it fulfills these requirements. And that grade will be 10% of final Long Paper grade. That is, the grade for the Long Paper will be derived from the proposal (10%) and the long paper itself (90%).
There are several places to find sources.
Future of Life Institute (see videos and articles at bottom of page)
Center for Human Compatible AI
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence Bibliography
And there are many more.