What are the big problems facing computer science? What are its reasons d’etre?
- We are drowning in data and computer scientists are the ones best equipped to deal with this problem. Programs in informatics are starting up, but their techniques seem valuable for libraries, but not so much for personal data management or efficiently manipulating scads of data to lead to some conclusion.
- Which leads me to the second problem. Efficiency. Computers are fast, but not fast enough to solve problems whose crappy solutions don’t scale poorly. So we need to have better algorithms and better tools for developing those algorithms.
- The internet and networking. We made this awesome infrastructure, and now we have to help make sure it stays awesome.
- Computers are hard to use, break all the time, and software sucks. This is a big problem and we need to fix it. Better programming techniques are one thing, but a better approach might be more powerful languages or a rethinking of the whole paradigm altogether.
Notice how programming is not on the list? Computer science is similar, but not the same as computer programming. We should help design better programming systems, but what we really need to have happen is the democratization of programming – we need people to write their own code to solve their own problems Computer scientists should serve as trouble shooters and help people through the sticky bits, but really, we are bad at solving peoples’ problems for them, and good at building tools to let them solve problems themselves.
I think I’ll focus on the drowning in data problem and the efficiency issue.
Oops. It turns out I meant the internet problem and the algorithmic efficiency problem. I care about the drowning in data problem, but every instantiation of that problem I have seen has either had a trivial solution or an AI-hard solution.
