The AGI Experience at CIHS
A graduate community for pioneers, professionals, and question-askers.
The M.S. in Artificial General Intelligence is housed within a university culture devoted to frontier questions in science, consciousness, technology, and human transformation. Students are invited into a learning community where technical AI study is joined with inquiry into cognition, consciousness, safety, ethics, and the human future.
Faculty-Led Frontier Inquiry
Students study with faculty working across artificial general intelligence, neuroscience, consciousness studies, cognitive systems, complex systems, ethics, and future-facing technology. Faculty bring both technical knowledge and transdisciplinary depth to questions that cannot be reduced to a single discipline.
Online Study with Real Connection
The AGI program is designed for distance-friendly graduate study without reducing learning to passive content delivery. Live faculty-led engagement, peer dialogue, project development, and sustained inquiry support students entering the field from across the United States and around the world.
Technical and Conceptual Depth
Students engage advanced AI systems, cognitive architectures, agents, neuro-symbolic approaches, algorithms, and evaluation methods while also asking deeper questions about intelligence, mind, consciousness, agency, value, and responsibility.
A Field-Building Culture
AGI is still an emerging field. That means students are not only learning established frameworks; they are entering a space where the central questions are still being clarified. CIHS supports students who want to help shape how this field develops technically, ethically, philosophically, and socially.
Career and Research Directions
Apply AGI knowledge to your work, research, and future direction.
AGI study can strengthen the expertise you already bring to technical practice, research, policy, law, medicine, education, or organizational leadership. The program provides an opportunity to develop deeper understanding of intelligent systems and apply that understanding through original work connected with your professional or intellectual goals.
AI Research & Engineering
Students may build toward work involving advanced AI systems, model evaluation, AI engineering, computational experimentation, applied development, and research-oriented technical practice. This direction is especially relevant for students interested in helping design, test, understand, or improve increasingly capable AI systems.
Agentic Systems & Cognitive Architectures
AGI research increasingly involves agents, reasoning systems, memory, planning, attention, adaptation, neuro-symbolic integration, and cognitive architectures. Students interested in models of general intelligence may use the program as a foundation for technical or research work in these emerging areas.
AI Safety & Alignment
As AI systems become more capable, questions of safety, value alignment, goal stability, evaluation, interpretability, and governance become more urgent. Students may pursue research or professional work focused on responsible development, risk assessment, and the design of systems that can be better understood, evaluated, and guided.
Human-AI Interaction
Explore how people learn, create, work, and make decisions with advanced AI. Students can connect AGI study with human–AI collaboration, interface design, education, creativity, psychology, healthcare, and other professional settings, examining how these systems affect human judgment, trust, agency, and responsible practice.
AI Ethics, Policy & Governance
Examine how AGI relates to ethics, regulation, institutional responsibility, civilizational risk, social impact, economic transformation, rights, personhood, and human–AI coexistence. Students can bring this understanding into policy and legal analysis, organizational leadership, strategy, risk assessment, oversight, and responsible AI adoption.
Doctoral Study & Research Preparation
The M.S. can also support preparation for doctoral study in AI, cognitive science, consciousness research, computational cognitive science, AI ethics, philosophy of mind, complex systems, or related interdisciplinary fields. Students interested in advanced scholarship can use the program to develop research questions, methods, and original project work.
Students can pursue or strengthen these directions according to their prior experience, preparation, and project work.
Research, Projects, and Student Inquiry
From serious questions to original AGI work.
The CIHS AGI experience is project-oriented and inquiry-driven. Students are encouraged to move beyond consuming information toward developing original work: technical, theoretical, empirical, ethical, mathematical, implementation-focused, or integrative.
The program’s final project sequence gives students an opportunity to pursue a serious question within the field of AGI and develop it into a substantial graduate-level contribution. Your final project can connect a serious AGI question with your professional experience, research interests, or intellectual goals.
Cognitive Architectures & Agentic Systems
Students may explore reasoning systems, adaptive agents, memory, attention, planning, goal formation, knowledge representation, neuro-symbolic systems, or cognitive models of general intelligence.
For example: Compare how an agent reasons or adapts under changing conditions, producing an experiment and analysis of its capabilities and limitations.
AI Safety, Alignment & Evaluation
Projects may focus on safety mechanisms, alignment frameworks, goal stability, risk assessment, evaluation protocols, interpretability, benchmarking, governance, or responsible AGI development.
For example: Develop and test an evaluation protocol for a system’s failure modes, then assess implications for safeguards or alignment.
Consciousness, Mind & Artificial Systems
Students may investigate consciousness studies for AGI, human consciousness and artificial minds, computational models of cognition, theories of awareness, or the consciousness - AGI intersection as it relates to advanced artificial systems.
For example: Compare theories of consciousness or agency with computational models, developing an original theoretical analysis or modeling investigation.
Robotics & Human-AI Interaction
Projects may examine embodied intelligence, robotics, sensorimotor systems, social AI, human-AI collaboration, interface design, education, creativity, or human-centered applications of advanced AI.
For example: Investigate how people judge an AI system’s reliability, producing a study or design analysis relevant to education, healthcare, or professional practice.
Ethics, Governance & Civilization
Students may explore how AGI could reshape work, education, economics, governance, social life, global risk, rights, personhood, and the future of human civilization.
For example: Develop an oversight framework informed by demonstrated system capabilities and risks, connecting technical understanding with policy, law, or organizational practice.
Creativity, Evolution & Emergence
Projects may investigate computational creativity, evolutionary learning, emergent behavior, complex systems, novel architectures, or new approaches to how intelligent systems generate, adapt, and transform.
For example: Investigate how an evolutionary or generative system produces novel behavior, creating an experiment or theoretical analysis of creativity and emergence.
Project questions, methods, and scope are developed with faculty to support substantial original work relevant to the student’s interests and goals.
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AGI and the Human Future
Why the field matters beyond technology.
Artificial General Intelligence may reshape how humanity understands intelligence, consciousness, creativity, knowledge, labor, governance, education, responsibility, and the future of civilization. The stakes are too large for a narrow education.
CIHS approaches AGI as both a technical and human question. Students are encouraged to ask what advanced AI systems are, what they may become, how they should be developed, and what kind of future they might help create.
The Nature of Intelligence
What is general intelligence? How do learning, reasoning, adaptation, embodiment, memory, attention, and consciousness shape our understanding of mind? AGI forces these questions into a new and urgent context.
Safety and Responsibility
As increasingly capable AI systems enter human life, questions of responsibility become central. How should systems be evaluated, aligned, governed, and developed in relation to human and planetary flourishing?
Society and Civilization
AGI may transform work, education, research, creativity, economics, governance, and social life. Students are invited to consider not only what these systems can do, but how they may reshape the conditions of human civilization.
Consciousness and Meaning
The study of AGI raises profound questions about consciousness, agency, identity, and meaning. What can human consciousness teach us about artificial minds? And what might artificial systems force us to reconsider about ourselves?
Your Path Into AGI
Enter the frontier of intelligence.
The future of AGI will not be shaped by technical skill alone. It will require people who can build, question, evaluate, imagine, and take responsibility. CIHS offers a distinctive graduate environment for students who want to engage advanced AI as one of the great technical, philosophical, ethical, and civilizational questions of our time.
Students who come to CIHS are not simply preparing for a changing job market. They are entering a field that may reshape the future of knowledge, mind, technology, and human life. The M.S. in Artificial General Intelligence is an invitation to study that future seriously — and to help shape it.