CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - The Machine Question (0 Points)
Assignment Goals
The goals of this assignment are:- To trace one modern question through every text of the semester
- To connect ancient and modern texts to the technologies that mediate daily life
- To practice critique of machines and algorithms as a sustained habit of mind
The Assignment
Purpose
This course quietly asks one modern question through every ancient text: what do we owe ourselves and each other in the age of the machine? Plato never saw a recommendation feed and Sappho never watched a fragment go viral, but every text on our syllabus turns out to have something precise to say about the systems that now mediate our attention, our relationships, and our sense of what is real. This strand makes that thread visible, so that when we reach Forster’s The Machine Stops in the final unit, you will discover that you have been assembling the semester’s thesis all along.
Task
Keep a dedicated “Machine Question” section in the commonplace book you are already keeping for this course. For each unit, you will add one short entry (the instructions below describe exactly what goes in it). There is nothing extra to turn in and no new deadlines: the strand travels with your commonplace book and is read when the commonplace book is read.
Criteria
This strand carries no separate points (0 points). It is assessed within the existing Informal Writing (10%) category as part of your commonplace book, at the midterm commonplace check and at the semester’s end. There is no new grade category; what I am looking for is the habit itself — a strand of entries that shows you carrying the question from text to text.
The Semester Map
Each unit gives the Machine Question a different angle. Use this map to orient each entry:
| Unit | Its Machine Question Angle |
|---|---|
| Plato, Allegory of the Cave | The algorithmic cave: recommendation feeds as shadows on the wall |
| Adichie, Dear Ijeawele | Who conditions the conditioners: where our teachers’ assumptions come from |
| Sappho | Fragments and viral decontextualization: what survives when context is stripped |
| Islamic Mystic Poetry | Mediation and translation: the layers between us and meaning |
| Plato, Euthyphro | Can a platform’s rules define the good? The algorithmic Euthyphro dilemma |
| Coates, Between the World and Me | Prediction, policing, and whose bodies bear the Dream |
| Genesis | Babel, naming, and data: who holds the power to name and categorize |
| Darwin | Memes, selection, and what spreads: why circulation is not the same as truth |
| McPhee, The Control of Nature | Engineering nature and control systems: what we build to hold back what we fear |
| Deloria, God Is Red | Place-based knowledge vs. placeless information |
| McLuhan | The medium and conversational AI: what the form does regardless of the content |
| Forster, The Machine Stops | The semester’s thesis test: the whole map, read at once |
Instructions
For each unit, add one entry to the Machine Question section of your commonplace book containing three things:
- One quotation from the text (with a page or line reference), chosen because it speaks to that unit’s angle in the map above.
- One “sighting in the wild”: something from your own week — a notification, a feed, a policy, a headline, an ad, an overheard remark about an app — that rhymes with the quotation.
- One sentence of your own AI-critique connecting them: a single sentence in which you say what the ancient text sees about the modern machine, or what the machine reveals about the text.
If you prefer, an entry may take the form of a miniature Four A’s (/Participation/FourAs): one sentence per “A” — assumption, agreement, argument, aspiration — about the machine-mediated “sighting,” still anchored by the unit’s quotation.
Entries are reviewed at the midterm commonplace check and again at the semester’s end, alongside the rest of your commonplace book.
The Culminating Entry: “The Machine Stops, 2126”
After the Forster unit’s design-fiction finale, write a one-page commonplace entry titled “The Machine Stops, 2126.” Look back through your semester of sightings and imagine which of them Forster would recognize: which of your entries describe appetites he already diagnosed in 1909, which describe something genuinely new, and what your own Kuno would notice first. This entry closes the strand and is read with your commonplace book at the end of the semester.
A Note on the AI Policy
To restate the course policy explicitly: this strand asks you to think about machines, never to have a machine think for you. No generative AI tool may produce any part of your prose, in this strand or anywhere else in the course. The Machine Question is an exercise in critique — your one sentence of AI-critique per unit must be exactly that: yours.
Formats (UDL)
You may render your entries as prose, as annotated sketches, or as clipped-and-annotated artifacts (a printed screenshot, a taped-in headline, a photographed poster — annotated in your own hand or your own words). Whatever the format, each entry still needs its three parts: the quotation, the sighting, and your one connecting sentence.
See also: How to Read Hard Texts in CIE (/Assignments/ReadingGuide) for the three-pass reading strategy and quote-harvesting habits that feed this strand.
Submission
No separate submission. Entries live in the Machine Question section of your commonplace book, which is reviewed at the midterm commonplace check and at the end of the semester.Please refer to the Style Guide for code quality examples and guidelines.