Public Computing Intellectuals in the Age of AI Crisis

The belief that AI technology is on the cusp of causing a generalized social crisis became a popular one in 2023. While there was no doubt an element of hype and exaggeration to some of these accounts, they do reflect the fact that there are troubling ramifications to this technology stack. This conjunction of shared concerns about social, political, and personal futures presaged by current developments in AI presents the academic discipline of computing with a renewed opportunity for self-examination and reconfiguration. This position article endeavors to do so in four sections. The first section explores what is at stake for computing in the narrative of an AI crisis. The second section articulates possible educational responses to this crisis and advocates for a broader analytic focus on power relations. The third section presents a novel characterization of academic computing’s field of practice, one which includes not only the discipline’s usual instrumental forms of practice but reflexive practice as well. This reflexive dimension integrates both the critical and public functions of the discipline as equal intellectual partners and a necessary component of any contemporary academic field. The final section will advocate for a conceptual archetype—the Public Computer Intellectual and its less conspicuous but still essential cousin, the Almost-Public Computer Intellectual—as a way of practically imagining the expanded possibilities of academic practice in our discipline, one that provides both self-critique and an outward-facing orientation toward the public good. It will argue that the computer education research community can play a vital role in this regard. Recommendations for pedagogical change within computing to develop more reflexive capabilities are also provided.