AI plus Computer Science is patient zero in the proliferation of AI plus degrees (e.g. AI and whatever). If you think that “AI and Computer Science” sounds like two versions of the same thing, then you are thinking the kinds of thoughts that terrify computer science departments. To be clear. Computer Science is a well-established and varied discipline. AI (at least in the context of these degree titles) is vaporware. Who knows what it means? Not the same.

That said, clearly there is plenty of panic around the future of career. So much so that two Carnegie Mellon computer science professors, Shaw and Hilton, wrote an open letter in the NY Times telling their (prospective) students not to panic. At the end they proclaim “what truly matters in computer science education: helping students develop the habits of mind that let them question, reason and apply judgment in a rapidly evolving field.”

Entre nous, from a discipline that’s been making that argument for 30 years… it doesn’t work.The funny thing is that they were the same disciplines rolling their eyes from the other side of the campus when the humanities went into free fall making the same claims about habits of mind. Of course, in Shaw and Hilton’s words, this habit of mind is “supervision.” Supervision of the AI. I think super-vision is an odd word choice for folks who didn’t seem to see this coming.

The lack of super-vision, of being able to see what AIs are doing, is at stake here. To imagine training your students to position themselves in some Archimedean position of super-vision… well, that’s just not what is happening. What does supervision really look like? Many things certainly. But the hubris(?) to say, “Don’t panic. We’ll teach you how to tame the AI beast and become its supervisor”? I’m sure they have that confidence, at least some times.

What’s more interesting to me is how computer science’s disciplinary response to AI as an existential threat infected the rest of the university and generated the institutional immunological responses we see now. The curricular versions of cordon sanitares go up all around: AI this, AI that. Suddenly AI is everyone’s problem, which at universities means it becomes an administrative problem. Without being too cynical about it (lol), CS defines AI in a manner that helps to solve its own disciplinary problems. Then university administrative structures push that disciplinary problem on the general faculty as part of the immunological response they are seeking.

The AI plus curricula participate in this narrative of CS as supervisory and super-visual. Mixing the narrative into other disciplinary content situates its values within other disciplinary structures. Make no mistake, those other disciplines might be doing the same thing: trying to get some of the AI magic to rub off on them just as the AI content needs the foundation of more conventional curricula to rub off on it.

I am actually reminded of a common trope in TV murder mysteries. An initial suspect is alibied by another person. The alibi turns out to be fake but it’s the other person, not the initial suspect, that is guilty. And/or one of the most common forms of grift *cough* I mean persuasion: let the other person think they are the one who came up with the great idea or is getting the good deal or won in the negotiation, etc. These are all rhetorical negotiations of course, though where the agency for negotiation arises is another matter.