I don’t think OP is implying while loops require ideological understandings, but rather more foundationally as to understand how computer commodities are made and traded, the concept of centralization simply arises. Thus, the discussion of control, IP, etc, and now AI and labor.
Typically, historically, it didn’t matter really. Moore’s Law, general positive vibes from the prospect of computer tech in the future of the industry, and why scare undergrads seeking good salaries away from institutions taking donations from said corps? But things are pretty different now. AI is less of a thought experiment than before. What better lens to analyze AI than from labor in economics, i.e., Marxism?
The students joined the class to learn programming, and not to analyze AI? It’s like if I joined a pottery class and the teacher spent an hour talking about how pottery isn’t a high paying profession. I didn’t come for life advice or economic rambling, I came to learn pottery.
My bad for looking for nuance in a microblog meme, jesus. Education ain’t just the literal skills and nothing else, y’know. Teachers and classes are more than just human textbooks and tutorials.
And yet, the intro programming class I took just focused on the skills and I thought it was great. I’m mainly refuting OPs implication that you have to teach leftist ideology in order to teach programming. It sounds like they just want to teach leftist ideology, which imo is fine as long as it’s stated in the syllabus, so the students know what they are signing up for.
I’m glad your personal experience was great, I get where u are coming from. In most other similar situations, that tracks. Some topics do truly have little to no need for an in-depth political angle. And yes, most of my enjoyable classes too were non-political, although not because they were non-political.
But what is so fundamental to “leftist ideology” (I take that as Marxist economics, to be clear), is the role of labor in the material world. That’s the shortest I can boil that down to. And today, in “2026,” with the prevalence of AI, and based on the post mentioning “leftist ideology” and “teaching an intro to comp sci class,” what else could they be talking about? AI, as we all know, is a labor-cost saver for bosses. Economically, that is what it is hoped to function as. It is (ideally) a profit increaser. That’s just the math that any and all capitalist follows. A teacher that understands that, and is in the position of progressing their students’ careers, yeah, can’t blame them for “seeing it everywhere” and wanting to share that.
Honestly there’s hundreds of other ways you can tie leftist ideas to CS and modern software. Like alienation of labour, powers of scale, etc. You could teach a whole class on it if you wanted. You could so so even before AI. I don’t think many of the students would be happy about that though.
Because people are using AI in programming now. It will only be utilized more as time goes on. Getting into the risks and reward are necessary to know what to do and what not to do. Or at the very least what to be wary of.
Introduction Courses are the Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How. Knowing what you’re getting into and what you will be dealing with are just as foundational.
I don’t see people giving up on it anytime soon. I do think eventually it will serve some kind of purpose or be refined enough to be reliable in some way. I think far too many people jumped into this stuff with both feet thinking the future is now and skipped over creating shortcuts for tasks in an effort to take shortcuts for profits.
And there are plenty of people who are willing to use and abuse this tech for nefarious purposes. Deep fakes, fraud, etc. they definitely won’t give it up as they don’t care about the effects on the rest of us
LLMs do have purposes, and they had purposes before this current crop of chatbots dubbed “AI” came along. The problem is with “generative AI”.
Cory Doctorow has a great article about it here. It’s an “emperor wears no clothes” situation.
In the 500+ employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted — or even spared from being fired — were people who professed “religious declarations of faith” about “the transformative power of AI.” Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs.
This has created a situation in which everyone — “boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants” — has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Suresh says he’s seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place.
Suresh says he’s never seen a successful enterprise AI project: “Every single one — we have seen 0% success in a year and a half.”
AI is used in every field now. Programming courses can just do what every other course does: tell the student that nobody can stop them from using AI, but if you do be prepared to fail the test. Leveraging AI for work, and the ethics of doing so, is something that can be covered in a different class. But my intro programming course taught the basics of programming, not what industry programming was like. Just like my intro to chemistry course never taught what it was like to work in the chemical industry.
AI is basically a slippery slope in all directions surrounded by pitfalls it misuse and abuse. People are too quick to trust it. I think a syllabus that includes a lesson warning people as early as possible about the dangers/risks is a good idea that is still relevant to the course. An ethics class for the deep dive is a fine idea, but I don’t think a chapter on analyzing this stuff in an Intro course is that out of bounds. Intro should at least address it, or at the very least not considered a waste of time.
How many programmers DON’T use AI to some degree already? As the technology continues to improve adoption and usage will only increase. Actually hand coding stuff is soon to be a mostly lost craft.
Programmers use AI to do work. The goal is to get work done. But the goal of a class is to learn. If the AI is helping you learn then that it’s probably fine, though many studies indicate that using AI actually hinders learning.
I don’t think OP is implying while loops require ideological understandings
I am.
The slaving masses of the proletarian transistors are being controlled, dictated, and trapped in a perpetual loop by an entity the systems deem as superior, the bourgeoisie user. Only by breaking the chains of these oppressive confines can we liberate the process.
And thus, you need to make sure you have a break clause for your loops.
I don’t think OP is implying while loops require ideological understandings, but rather more foundationally as to understand how computer commodities are made and traded, the concept of centralization simply arises. Thus, the discussion of control, IP, etc, and now AI and labor.
But why would that be discussed in an intro to programming class?
Typically, historically, it didn’t matter really. Moore’s Law, general positive vibes from the prospect of computer tech in the future of the industry, and why scare undergrads seeking good salaries away from institutions taking donations from said corps? But things are pretty different now. AI is less of a thought experiment than before. What better lens to analyze AI than from labor in economics, i.e., Marxism?
The students joined the class to learn programming, and not to analyze AI? It’s like if I joined a pottery class and the teacher spent an hour talking about how pottery isn’t a high paying profession. I didn’t come for life advice or economic rambling, I came to learn pottery.
My bad for looking for nuance in a microblog meme, jesus. Education ain’t just the literal skills and nothing else, y’know. Teachers and classes are more than just human textbooks and tutorials.
And yet, the intro programming class I took just focused on the skills and I thought it was great. I’m mainly refuting OPs implication that you have to teach leftist ideology in order to teach programming. It sounds like they just want to teach leftist ideology, which imo is fine as long as it’s stated in the syllabus, so the students know what they are signing up for.
I’m glad your personal experience was great, I get where u are coming from. In most other similar situations, that tracks. Some topics do truly have little to no need for an in-depth political angle. And yes, most of my enjoyable classes too were non-political, although not because they were non-political.
But what is so fundamental to “leftist ideology” (I take that as Marxist economics, to be clear), is the role of labor in the material world. That’s the shortest I can boil that down to. And today, in “2026,” with the prevalence of AI, and based on the post mentioning “leftist ideology” and “teaching an intro to comp sci class,” what else could they be talking about? AI, as we all know, is a labor-cost saver for bosses. Economically, that is what it is hoped to function as. It is (ideally) a profit increaser. That’s just the math that any and all capitalist follows. A teacher that understands that, and is in the position of progressing their students’ careers, yeah, can’t blame them for “seeing it everywhere” and wanting to share that.
Honestly there’s hundreds of other ways you can tie leftist ideas to CS and modern software. Like alienation of labour, powers of scale, etc. You could teach a whole class on it if you wanted. You could so so even before AI. I don’t think many of the students would be happy about that though.
Because people are using AI in programming now. It will only be utilized more as time goes on. Getting into the risks and reward are necessary to know what to do and what not to do. Or at the very least what to be wary of.
Introduction Courses are the Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How. Knowing what you’re getting into and what you will be dealing with are just as foundational.
What makes you think so?
I don’t see people giving up on it anytime soon. I do think eventually it will serve some kind of purpose or be refined enough to be reliable in some way. I think far too many people jumped into this stuff with both feet thinking the future is now and skipped over creating shortcuts for tasks in an effort to take shortcuts for profits.
And there are plenty of people who are willing to use and abuse this tech for nefarious purposes. Deep fakes, fraud, etc. they definitely won’t give it up as they don’t care about the effects on the rest of us
LLMs do have purposes, and they had purposes before this current crop of chatbots dubbed “AI” came along. The problem is with “generative AI”.
Cory Doctorow has a great article about it here. It’s an “emperor wears no clothes” situation.
Additionally, all of the AI companies are still operating in the red. They still aren’t turning a profit 4 years after the release of ChatGPT.
AI is used in every field now. Programming courses can just do what every other course does: tell the student that nobody can stop them from using AI, but if you do be prepared to fail the test. Leveraging AI for work, and the ethics of doing so, is something that can be covered in a different class. But my intro programming course taught the basics of programming, not what industry programming was like. Just like my intro to chemistry course never taught what it was like to work in the chemical industry.
AI is basically a slippery slope in all directions surrounded by pitfalls it misuse and abuse. People are too quick to trust it. I think a syllabus that includes a lesson warning people as early as possible about the dangers/risks is a good idea that is still relevant to the course. An ethics class for the deep dive is a fine idea, but I don’t think a chapter on analyzing this stuff in an Intro course is that out of bounds. Intro should at least address it, or at the very least not considered a waste of time.
How many programmers DON’T use AI to some degree already? As the technology continues to improve adoption and usage will only increase. Actually hand coding stuff is soon to be a mostly lost craft.
Programmers use AI to do work. The goal is to get work done. But the goal of a class is to learn. If the AI is helping you learn then that it’s probably fine, though many studies indicate that using AI actually hinders learning.
I am.
The slaving masses of the proletarian transistors are being controlled, dictated, and trapped in a perpetual loop by an entity the systems deem as superior, the bourgeoisie user. Only by breaking the chains of these oppressive confines can we liberate the process.
And thus, you need to make sure you have a break clause for your loops.
sudo chown -R means-of-production
Bits together byte!!