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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.