Well… I’d think that falls under the usual “critical thinking” category.
But… with all the hype and buzz surrounding “AI”, maybe some crafty educators could sneak in a bunch of critical thinking under the ostensible purpose of teaching how to effectively and accurately use LLMs for legitimate purposes.
Beyond that, the actual underlying technology is pretty specialized stuff. Even with a CS degree and a career in IT, most of the actual underpinnings are stuff where I understand the jargon, but not really how it works at all.
I wouldn’t think that being able to actually create and train AIs will be a really specialized job for too much longer; if the usual industry trend holds, it’ll be five years and they’ll be selling us AI toolkits with wizards where some IT flunky basically sets it up on a server, identifies the corpus of training data, sets certain parameters, lets it train itself, and then sets up whatever feedback loops there are to refine the answers in the real world.
The real meat of the problem is going to be how businesses and governments actually effectively use AI to enhance whatever it is that they do. At some point, it’s going to quit being new and shiny, and just be more infrastructure in the background, like every other technological fad.
55 years ago, when I went to college, CS101 classes taught programming. I never took one, having learned in high school, but I taught one once. When my daughter went, 20 years ago, the CS101 class taught ftp, some UNIX stuff, and a tiny bit of Javascript, fill in the blanks, not real programming.
So I agree we shouldn’t teach programming to all, but maybe computer literacy so they can understand what they do already. Kind of like how useful it was to really teach programming to the kids who came into college thinking they knew everything because they could code BASIC programs on their Apples.
Between being adept on their phones and using their Chromebooks as textbooks online, they ARE getting plenty of computer education indirectly. We do have an after-school “Coding Club” for our junior high kids that is teaching them the rudiments of programing such as creating batch files and such.
Or managers who thought they understood ‘programming’ because they had written a couple of simple excel macros… (shudder)!
I would disagree. They are getting conditioned by slick user interfaces to using computers without really understanding them at all.
I am thinking of the cases where people have apparently been groomed into suicide by things like ChatGPT because they mistake the thing for a ‘friend’ or ‘companion’. To be clear: it’s probable that a lot of these reports are sensationalized and inaccurately reported. We can’t be sure without seeing the unedited transcripts, but I do think there is a real risk here.
I wouldn’t necessarily pooh-pooh batch files, Visual Basic/VBScript, macros, Roblox, Scratch, etc. Those are rudimentary forms of programming. I got my start making text adventure games in DOS batch files, Jeopardy in Powerpoint macros, and Warcraft 3 mods. They eventually led to a career in programming, which paid the bills more than my college degree ever did…
Alas, I don’t think that’s a viable career path anymore. Beginner/junior programming is the first job AI will replace (and is already replacing).
I wish we also taught an “ethics of computing” class, discussing not just AI-assisted suicide but things like enshittification, privacy, propaganda, scams, etc. We teach these skills like they’re values-neutral when in reality they often directly contribute to evil monopolistic subscription-based lock-in (Microsoft, ESRI, Oracle, Peoplesoft, Meta React for Google Chrome, etc.) and societal issues (foreign influences & ownership of social media, massive wealth inequality, rapid gentrification, etc.).
We only prepare our students to be the best cogs they can be. They deserve better than that.
Second your shudder. I had the opposite problem. When I switched groups, there was a guy who spent all his time on “maintaining” 50 lines of code. Which I soon rewrote to 20 lines. The boss had no clue.
Some schools already offer basic AI units inside computer science classes. Students learn what algorithms are, how data works, and how simple models make decisions. They also cover limits, risks, and how to use these tools safely.
A solid beginner curriculum would teach data literacy, simple coding, model behavior, and critical thinking. The goal is to help students understand how AI works so they can use it responsibly rather than treat it like magic.