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. Interestingly, some of these worries were voiced from within the tech sector itself. 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 machine learning and data science presents the academic discipline of computing with a rare opportunity for self-examination and reconfiguration. This position paper endeavors to do so in four sections. The first expands on the nature of the AI crisis for computing. The second articulates possible critical 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 epistemological field, one which includes not only the discipline's usual instrumental forms of knowledge but reflexive knowledge 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--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 towards the public good. It will argue that the computer education research community can play a vital role in this regard.