{"id":147682,"date":"2022-10-06T23:23:30","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T04:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/the-end-of-programming"},"modified":"2022-10-06T23:23:30","modified_gmt":"2022-10-07T04:23:30","slug":"the-end-of-programming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/the-end-of-programming","title":{"rendered":"The End of Programming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-end-of-programming.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em class=\"\">The end of classical Computer Science is coming, and most of us are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I came of age in the 1980s, programming personal computers like the Commodore VIC-20 and Apple ][e at home. Going on to study Computer Science in college and ultimately getting a PhD at Berkeley, the bulk of my professional training was rooted in what I will call \u201cclassical\u201d CS: programming, algorithms, data structures, systems, programming languages. In Classical Computer Science, the ultimate goal is to reduce an idea to a program written by a human \u2014 source code in a language like Java or C++ or Python. Every idea in Classical CS \u2014 no matter how complex or sophisticated \u2014 from a database join algorithm to the mind-bogglingly obtuse Paxos consensus protocol \u2014 can be expressed as a human-readable, human-comprehendible program.<\/p>\n<p>When I was in college in the early \u201990s, we were still in the depth of the AI Winter, and AI as a field was likewise dominated by classical algorithms. My first research job at Cornell was working with <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/web.mit.edu\/hutt\/www\/\" rel=\"noopener ugc nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">Dan Huttenlocher<\/a>, a leader in the field of computer vision (and now Dean of the MIT School of Computing). In Dan\u2019s PhD-level computer vision course in 1995 or so, we never once discussed anything resembling deep learning or neural networks\u2014it was all classical algorithms like Canny edge detection, optical flow, and Hausdorff distances. Deep learning was in its infancy, not yet considered mainstream AI, let alone mainstream CS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The end of classical Computer Science is coming, and most of us are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit. I came of age in the 1980s, programming personal computers like the Commodore VIC-20 and Apple ][e at home. Going on to study Computer Science in college and ultimately getting a PhD at Berkeley, the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":359,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,12,41,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asteroid-comet-impacts","category-existential-risks","category-information-science","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}