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.
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.
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.
LLMs are usually designed with a “seed” number that changes the result. If you feed a random number generator to this seed input, it will effectively make the outputs non-deterministic.
So if you combine the LLM with this random number generator, this system as a whole would act like the biological system you described: same input, different outputs.
It’s not that people can’t read anymore. It takes time+effort to read, and unfortunately you, an anonymous internet poster, haven’t built enough reputation to warrant the investment. Make a few clear insightful points to prove that you are worth engaging with, and you can clarify your position in further comments.
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.
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.
If your goal is to braindump, go right ahead, but if your goal is for people to read what you wrote, you’re going to have to really work on shortening your posts 🙂
But why would that be discussed in an intro to programming class?
When LLMs output words, are those choices? What’s the difference between a neural net producing output and biological neurons producing output, in terms of free will?
Yup, free will is what I was alluding to. Part of the difficulty of defining “consciousness”, is to first define “free will” and “understanding”
Does a a random number generator attached to the trigger of a nuclear bomb, satisfy that definition of consciousness? Honest question, because I’m not entirely sure I understand your definition
I use that so much I just assumed AI got it from me