The cultural and political implications of modern AI research are not some far off concern, they are things that affect the world in the here and now. From advanced control systems with advanced visualizations and image processing techniques that drive the machines of the modern military to the slow creep of a mechanized workforce, ethical questions surround us. Part of dealing with these ethical questions is not just speculating on what could be but teaching our students how to engage with these ethical questions. We explore the use of science fiction as an appropriate tool to enable AI researchers to help engage students and the public on the current state and potential impacts of AI.

In this paper we describe an evolutionary algorithm for assigning students to courses in a situation where each student specifies a set of courses in order of preference, each course has a limited enrollment, and the object is to maximize the overall student satisfaction by assigning each student to a course as high on his or her preference list as possible. Results of using the algorithm on historical data are compared to the success of a human in making the assignments. This work was done as part of a summer undergraduate research project while the second author was still a student. We also report preliminary results for using this problem as the basis for an assignment in a course in Artificial Intelligence.