TECHNOLOGISTS AND FUTURISM

Steve DeAngelis at ERMB recently had what was for me, an extremely interesting post, entitled “The Future of Computing“. I say, “interesting” because the implications of Steve’s post and the issues they in turn raise, range far beyond computers themselves into the evolutionary trajectories of civilization. I would like to elucidate or speculate about a number of Steve’s points but I encourage you to first read his post in full as well as the underlying article from the New York Times.

Some excerpts:

“Lohr then rhetorically asks, “What’s next?” Some of the answers to that question, he reports, were discussed last month during a Washington, DC, symposium held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. At the “2016” symposium, Lohr reports:

Computer scientists from academia and companies like I.B.M. and Google discussed topics including social networks, digital imaging, online media and the impact on work and employment. But most talks touched on two broad themes: the impact of computing will go deeper into the sciences and spread more into the social sciences, and policy issues will loom large, as the technology becomes more powerful and more pervasive.”

A while back, I had a discussion with Dave Schuler regarding “wicked problems” and had this to say on computers and intractable problems:

“First of all, not all “wicked problems” were created equally wicked. We must differentiate between those problems that are intractable from those that are merely hard or prohibitively expensive. The latter involves a significant degree of human value choice while the former is effectively beyond any direct solution within our present power to efface. Many cutting edge scientific questions are temporarily intractable until, say for example, computing power increases by a given order of magnitude“

At a certain point, quantitative increases in computing power effectively represent qualitative increases by virtue of shifting the boundaries in intractability in scientific fields, permitting an extended experimental range and new discoveries. These in turn spawn new, previously unanticipated problems for investigation.

Steve went on to write:

“Lohr then rhetorically asks, “What’s next?” Some of the answers to that question, he reports, were discussed last month during a Washington, DC, symposium held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. At the “2016” symposium, Lohr reports:

Computer scientists from academia and companies like I.B.M. and Google discussed topics including social networks, digital imaging, online media and the impact on work and employment. But most talks touched on two broad themes: the impact of computing will go deeper into the sciences and spread more into the social sciences, and policy issues will loom large, as the technology becomes more powerful and more pervasive.

Policy is always racing to keep up with technology, but Lohr implies that policymakers are going to have to move even faster. We’re all aware of privacy issues, but ethical issues are also likely to arise about how data is collected and used.”

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