  The belief that AI technology is on the cusp of causing a generalized social
crisis became a popular one in 2023. While there was no doubt an element of
hype and exaggeration to some of these accounts, they do reflect the fact that
there are troubling ramifications to this technology stack. This conjunction of
shared concerns about social, political, and personal futures presaged by
current developments in artificial intelligence presents the academic
discipline of computing with a renewed opportunity for self-examination and
reconfiguration. This position paper endeavors to do so in four sections. The
first explores what is at stake for computing in the narrative of an AI crisis.
The second articulates possible educational responses to this crisis and
advocates for a broader analytic focus on power relations. The third section
presents a novel characterization of academic computing's field of practice,
one which includes not only the discipline's usual instrumental forms of
practice but reflexive practice as well. This reflexive dimension integrates
both the critical and public functions of the discipline as equal intellectual
partners and a necessary component of any contemporary academic field. The
final section will advocate for a conceptual archetype--the Public Computer
Intellectual and its less conspicuous but still essential cousin, the (Almost)
Public Computer Intellectual--as a way of practically imagining the expanded
possibilities of academic practice in our discipline, one that provides both
self-critique and an outward-facing orientation towards the public good. It
will argue that the computer education research community can play a vital role
in this regard. Recommendations for pedagogical change within computing to
develop more reflexive capabilities are also provided.
