Computing and the Future of Everything

David Gerhard University of Regina

STEMfest 2015

Dr. David Gerhard

Which school subjects can benefit from including computing in their

curriculum?

All of them.

Which industries need IT workers?

All of them.

Which industries need IT workers?

• All industry needs web, database, IT infrastructure and social media

• Most industries also need computing innovation for industry-specific design, solutions, and information management

Title Text

Those grads will probably end up doing computing work

CS / IT careers aren’t just vastly under-subscribed and critical for

the future of everything,

they are also rewarding, interesting, fulfilling, lucrative and pay well

1 Doctor: $100,000 (average starting salary for a GP) 2 Dentist: $90,000 3 Petroleum engineer: $86,220 (or $58,249 depending on source) 4 Data security analyst: $83,250 5 Lawyer, first-year associate, large firm: $81,750-$89,000 6 Web site developer/user experience designer: $80,000 7 Mobile applications developers: $72,500 8 Chemical engineer: $72,407 9 Financial controller: $70,000 10 Lawyer, first-year associate, midsize firm: $64,000-$77,500 11 Lawyer, first-year associate, small/midsize firm: $63,250-$68,500 12 Industrial/mechanical engineer: $61,944 13 Mining engineer: $59,612 14 Accountant: $58,750 15 Nurse: $55,000 16 Banking/finance: 17 Geologist/geophysicist (in the petroleum industry): $53,058 18 Web designer: $49,980 19 Database analyst: $48,056 20 Lawyer, first-year associate, small firm: $48,000-$65,250

2012 starting salaries (source: globe and mail)

2012 starting salaries (source: globe and mail)

1 Doctor: $100,000 (average starting salary for a GP) 2 Dentist: $90,000 3 Petroleum engineer: $86,220 (or $58,249 depending on source) 4 Data security analyst: $83,250 5 Lawyer, first-year associate, large firm: $81,750-$89,000 6 Web site developer/user experience designer: $80,000 7 Mobile applications developers: $72,500 8 Chemical engineer: $72,407 9 Financial controller: $70,000 10 Lawyer, first-year associate, midsize firm: $64,000-$77,500 11 Lawyer, first-year associate, small/midsize firm: $63,250-$68,500 12 Industrial/mechanical engineer: $61,944 13 Mining engineer: $59,612 14 Accountant: $58,750 15 Nurse: $55,000 16 Banking/finance: 17 Geologist/geophysicist (in the petroleum industry): $53,058 18 Web designer: $49,980 19 Database analyst: $48,056 20 Lawyer, first-year associate, small firm: $48,000-$65,250

CS / IT careers benefit society

Student Interests combined with computer science leads to

Innovative Careers

Healthcare + CS / IT

• Medical informatics • Telehealth • Diagnostics • Nursing informatics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqESR7E4b_8

Science + CS / IT• Bioinformatics • Environmental

Monitoring • High-Energy Particle

Physics • Mathematical

Modelling

Criminal Justice + CS / IT• Biometrics • Digital forensics • Information Security • Cyberterrorism,

cyberwar, and cyberespionage

Humanities + CS / IT• Digital art practice • Computer composition

and performance • Deep literature analytics • 3d printing for animation • Video games

Education + CS / IT• Educational technology • Instructional design • Assistive technology • e-learning, online

learning, and distance education

Business + CS / IT• Entrepreneurs and startups • Management information

systems • Database security • Network design and

management • Business Intelligence

Choose-your-own CS/IT career:• Take your interests • Add "digital" or

"informatics" • Invent new career • … • profit

Sports! Cars!

Art! Music!

Digital Art! Music Informatics!

Sports Informatics! Digital Cars!

Computers and Robots are

traditional careers

“Humans need not apply” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

15 minutes. Worth watching

poised to replace

Computers and Robots are

traditional careers

“Humans need not apply” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

15 minutes. Worth watching

already replacing

45% of the workforce is in jobs that could easily be automated by robots with today’s

artificial intelligence

Machine Creativity

• Computers write music for movies, computers write jokes, computers write thousands of pages of sports journalism, business strategy, and legal discovery.

Automated Sports JournalismTuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field.

Twenty-seven Colonials came to the plate and the Virginia pitcher vanquished them all, pitching a perfect game. He struck out 10 batters while recording his momentous feat. Roberts got Ryan Thomas to ground out for the final out of the game.

Tom Gately came up short on the rubber for the Colonials, recording a loss. He went three innings, walked two, struck out one, and allowed two runs.

The Cavaliers went up for good in the fourth, scoring two runs on a fielder's choice and a balk.

Turing: 9 objections to AI (1950)• Religious: Computers will never have a soul

• Head in the sand: It’s too terrible to think about

• Mathematical: Godel’s incompleteness theorem

• Consciousness: "not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt…”

• Disabilities: there will never be a computer that can ___

Turing: 9 objections to AI (1950)• Originality: a computer can only do what we program it

to do

• Continuity: computers are digital but brains are analog

• Informality of behaviour: any system governed by laws is predictable

• ESP (we’ll let this one slide…)

Creativity and intelligence“Computers will never be intelligent because they never will be able to be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly, have initiative, have a sense of humor, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, make someone fall in love with it, learn from experience, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought, have as much diversity of behaviour as a man, do something really new.”

Against the “argument from disability”• a computer can be programmed to make mistakes

• a computer can be programmed to observe its own processes

• a computer can be programmed to learn from experience

• a computer can be programmed to be friendly

Computing dramatically influences society today

Someone wrote these

Someone made decisions about how these should

work

these code decisions fundamentally shape the discourse of the planet

Transitions are coming

If computing is the future of everything, what does that future look like?

Transitions are coming

The Platform Shift is over

Sales volume by category

0

100000

200000

300000

400000

PCs/Laptops Premium PC Tablets

2013 2014 2015

The Platform Shift is overSales volume by category

0

500000

1000000

1500000

2000000

PCs/Laptops Premium PC Tablets Phones

2013 2014 2015

End of TV

End of Moore’s Law• RAM speed topped out int 1965, Disk speed

is making a jump to SSD, but it’s also flat.

• Clock speed topped out in 2003

• More processors is only useful if programmers write well-threaded code (which we don’t)

• Latest chip processes are close to heat limits

• improvements will come from software, not hardware

End of Work• As robots and AI displace more jobs,

unemployment may surpass depression-era rates

• Computing jobs will thrive, until they too will be replaced

• What does the world look like when most of us don’t work to make money?

End of Community• Social Media Fragmentation = end of a singular

shared experience

• More and more smaller and smaller networks with specialized content, intent, policy, and agenda

• More confirmation bias and more insulation from the rest of the world

• More polarization of opinions and ideas

End of Privacy

• Ashley Madison hack

• Online sites cannot be trusted with private information

• Millennials are comfortable with limited (or no) privacy, as long as tradeoffs are valuable

End of Advertising • flash advertising hurts website load time

• Many people use ad-blocking on desktop sites

• Mobile platforms now support ad blocking technology

• Sites with invasive ads (eg popups) will lose money and traffic, Sites with targeted and subtle ads (eg Facebook) will succeed

• If ads power the web, ad-blocking = upheaval

Future of tech

• 8 emerging technologies that are becoming popular (as seen at STEMfest)

• What is the role of the programmer

• How will they be seen by the public

Future of tech

3d Printers

• Constructing Commodities, personalization

• Depends on ability to design in 3d

• Copyright,design ownership, supply chain, marketing will change

• many STEM applications

Personal Drones

• Airborne cameras, many STEM applications

• Dichotomy between perceptions

• Laws are keeping up this time

Internet of Things

• Still looking for a killer app / compelling use case

• many STEM applications

• Real-time monitoring of the world

Wearables and Health Technology

• Health data is lower-quality but continuous

• Integrated health tracking with mobile devices

• Datasets in the thousands rather than the tens

• many STEM applications

Virtual Reality

• Getting better, more immersive

• Platform fragmentation, but common formats

• Content is missing

• STEM applications

Virtual Reality Content Creation

• Content creation for VR

• New kinds of selfies, videos, travel photos, training, promotion, etc

• STEM

Self-Driving Cars

• Millions of autonomous miles

• 2 accidents in the last month, caused by human drivers

• Can replace human drivers, are better than human drivers

• Driving won’t go away, but most people won’t drive

Augmented Reality

• Google glass was a problem

• Microsoft Hololens is promising

• Medical, industrial, gaming applications

• STEM

The future is code

Code is a necessary but not sufficient condition

“Computer science — not computer literacy —

underlies most innovation today, from biotechnology to cinematography to

energy and climate change.”

National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT)