{"id":151,"date":"2006-11-01T23:28:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-01T23:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=151"},"modified":"2006-11-01T23:28:00","modified_gmt":"2006-11-01T23:28:00","slug":"my-daily-dose-of-depression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=151","title":{"rendered":"My daily dose of depression"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s Times ran an essay<\/a> by Steve Lohr, based on speeches about the future of computing given by my former teachers Richard Karp and Jon Kleinberg. Though most of the essay is welcome and unobjectionable, let’s look at the first two paragraphs:<\/p>\n

Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the “universal machine” in the late 1930’s — the idea that a computer in theory could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including the human brain — all that remained to be done was mere engineering.<\/p>\n

The more generous perspective today is that decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed, storage and networking, along with the development of increasingly clever software, have brought computing into science, business and culture in ways that were barely imagined years ago. The quantitative changes delivered through smart engineering opened the door to qualitative changes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, here are the two options on offer from the paper of record: either<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. computer science was finished off by Alan Turing, or<\/li>\n
  2. “stunningly rapid advances in processing speed, storage and networking” have reopened it just recently.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Even among the commenters on this<\/a> post by Chad Orzel — which Dave Bacon forwarded to me with the subject line “bait” — awareness of any third possibility seems depressingly rare. Judging from the evidence, it’s not that people have engaged the mysteries of P versus NP, randomness and determinism, one-way functions and interactive proofs, and found them insufficiently deep. Rather, as bizarre as it sounds, it’s that people don’t know these mysteries exist — just as they wouldn’t know about black holes or the Big Bang if no one told them. If you want to understand why our subject — which by any objective standard, has contributed at least as much over the last 30 years as (say) particle physics or cosmology to humankind’s basic picture of the universe — receives a whopping $5 million a year from the NSF (with even that in constant danger), look no further.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Yesterday’s Times ran an essay by Steve Lohr, based on speeches about the future of computing given by my former teachers Richard Karp and Jon Kleinberg. Though most of the essay is welcome and unobjectionable, let’s look at the first two paragraphs: Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[5,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-complexity","category-csphysics-deathmatch"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}