What will the world look like in 10 years? Computing shows us the answer

1. Computing and the
Future of Everything
David Gerhard
University of Regina
STEMfest 2015

2. Dr. David Gerhard

3. Which school subjects can benefit
from including computing in their
curriculum?
All of them.

4. Which industries need IT
workers?
All of them.

5. 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

6. Title Text
Those grads will probably end up doing computing work

7. 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

8. 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
10Lawyer, first-year associate, midsize firm: $64,000-$77,500
11Lawyer, first-year associate, small/midsize firm: $63,250-$68,500
12Industrial/mechanical engineer: $61,944
13Mining engineer: $59,612
14Accountant: $58,750
15Nurse: $55,000
16Banking/finance:
17Geologist/geophysicist (in the petroleum industry): $53,058
18Web designer: $49,980
19Database analyst: $48,056
20Lawyer, first-year associate, small firm: $48,000-$65,250
2012 starting salaries (source: globe and mail)

9. 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
10Lawyer, first-year associate, midsize firm: $64,000-$77,500
11Lawyer, first-year associate, small/midsize firm: $63,250-$68,500
12Industrial/mechanical engineer: $61,944
13Mining engineer: $59,612
14Accountant: $58,750
15Nurse: $55,000
16Banking/finance:
17Geologist/geophysicist (in the petroleum industry): $53,058
18 Web designer: $49,980
19 Database analyst: $48,056
20Lawyer, first-year associate, small firm: $48,000-$65,250

10. CS / IT careers benefit society
Student Interests combined with
computer science leads to
Innovative Careers

11. Healthcare + CS / IT
• Medical informatics
• Telehealth
• Diagnostics
• Nursing informatics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqESR7E4b_8

12. Science + CS / IT
• Bioinformatics
• Environmental
Monitoring
• High-Energy Particle
Physics
• Mathematical
Modelling

13. Criminal Justice + CS / IT
• Biometrics
• Digital forensics
• Information Security
• Cyberterrorism,
cyberwar, and
cyberespionage

14. Humanities + CS / IT
• Digital art practice
• Computer composition
and performance
• Deep literature analytics
• 3d printing for animation
• Video games

15. Education + CS / IT
• Educational technology
• Instructional design
• Assistive technology
• e-learning, online
learning, and distance
education

16. Business + CS / IT
• Entrepreneurs and startups
• Management information
systems
• Database security
• Network design and
management
• Business Intelligence

17. 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!

18. 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

19. Computers and Robots are
traditional careers
“Humans need not apply”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
15 minutes. Worth watching
already replacing

21. 45% of the workforce is in jobs that could
easily be automated by robots with today’s
artificial intelligence

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

23. Automated Sports Journalism
Tuesday 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.

24. 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 ___

25. 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…)

26. 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.”

27. 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

30. Computing dramatically
influences society today

34. Someone wrote these

35. Someone made decisions
about how these should
work

36. these code decisions
fundamentally shape the
discourse of the planet

37. Transitions are coming

38. If computing is the future of everything, what
does that future look like?
Transitions are coming

39. The Platform Shift is over
Sales volume by category
0
100000
200000
300000
400000
PCs/Laptops Premium PC Tablets
2013 2014 2015

40. The Platform Shift is over
Sales volume by category
0
500000
1000000
1500000
2000000
PCs/Laptops Premium PC Tablets Phones
2013 2014 2015

41. End of TV

42. 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

43. 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?

44. 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

45. 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

46. 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

48. Future of tech

49. • 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

50. 3d Printers
• Constructing Commodities,
personalization
• Depends on ability to design in 3d
• Copyright,design ownership, supply
chain, marketing will change
• many STEM applications

51. Personal Drones
• Airborne cameras, many STEM
applications
• Dichotomy between perceptions
• Laws are keeping up this time

52. Internet of Things
• Still looking for a killer app /
compelling use case
• many STEM applications
• Real-time monitoring of the world

53. 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

54. Virtual Reality
• Getting better, more immersive
• Platform fragmentation, but
common formats
• Content is missing
• STEM applications

55. Virtual Reality Content Creation
• Content creation for VR
• New kinds of selfies, videos,
travel photos, training,
promotion, etc
• STEM

56. 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

57. Augmented Reality
• Google glass was a problem
• Microsoft Hololens is promising
• Medical, industrial, gaming
applications
• STEM

59. The future is code
Code is a necessary but
not sufficient condition

60. “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)