1. While I said the course will focus on AI as "Acting rationally", I tried at least a few times, on why it is useful to consider the human angle (acting like humans, thinking like humans etc) at least as long as we are interested in having AI systems co-exist with humans. For an elaboration of this argument, here is a talk on "human-aware AI" that I gave sometime back: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/uw-haai-talk.ppt (and audio: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/rao-uw-talk.WAV ).
2. Here is a little graphic that AAAI (association for the advancement of AI) made recently to give an idea of the AI landscape (and the kind of applications currently feasible) http://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Poster/ailandscape.jpg (the emphasis was a bit more on the day-to-day life than stuff like planetary exploration but still it will give you an inkling for various subfield buzzwords). AAAI ( www.aaai.org) also maintains AI-related news and short introductions to various AI areas.
3. Robots taking over all our jobs was only partly sensationalism; here is a recent NY Times story that says most new jobs are going to them robots (damn those robots; probably manufactured in foreign lands too ;-)
5. In general, doing AI gives us ample opportunity to introspect on the side about to the rationality of our own decision making; that is the theme of a lay-person lecture I gave last April.