HUMAN 0540 - WORKPLACE AI
Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
The contemporary workplace is increasingly shaped not only by software tools, but by software collaborators: systems that act, plan, execute, and communicate in ways that resemble (and sometimes replace) human labor. These “agents” are both productivity features and cultural objects that change how work is imagined, assigned, supervised, valued, and narrated. Workplace AI positions students to interpret this transformation from within a humanities framework: how human-AI teams alter communication, authorship, accountability, expertise, and professional identity. The course focuses on agentic AI workflows: multi-step systems that can pursue goals, coordinate sub-tasks, retrieve information, produce artifacts, and interact with humans and other systems. Students examine common patterns (delegation, review loops, retrieval and verification, multi-agent coordination, tool use, escalation, and audit trails) and evaluate how these patterns reshape the rhetoric of work: what counts as “skill,” what is credited as “authorship,” and what becomes invisible labor. Rather than centering operational efficiency frameworks such as Lean Six Sigma/SIPOC (valuable within business contexts but often oriented toward measurement and throughput, like KPIs), this course adopts design thinking and human-centered inquiry. Students explore how augmented workflows are designed for human comprehension, alignment, trust, and accountability, and how poor design can produce misunderstanding, overreliance, deskilling, surveillance pressures, and ethical drift. The emphasis remains on meaning, experience, and culture: how people live with these systems, how narratives of “automation” shape behavior, and how institutions justify or resist the changing nature of labor. Key topics include: human-AI teaming models; agent design patterns and workflow orchestration; trust calibration and verification cultures; explainability as a communication problem (not merely a technical one); authorship, authenticity, and responsibility in co-produced work; the politics of automation and surveillance; and the role of agents in creative, administrative, research, and public-facing tasks. Students will engage with examples across sectors (education, media, healthcare, government, customer service, and knowledge work) to understand how agentic systems move from novelty to institutional norm. Assignments emphasize analysis and applied critique, with selected demonstrations of agentic workflows used to support, and not replace, human scholarship. Students may prototype constrained, accountable workflows (e.g., research assistants with citation requirements, content planning with human editorial control, multi-step project scaffolds) while maintaining strict expectations for human-authored thinking, interpretation, and evaluation. The goal is to help students become capable collaborators in an automated workplace: individuals who can design, critique, communicate about, and ethically steward human-AI systems.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SU3 Elective Basis
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