[scott_s]

Expanding even more upon a reply to a sibling comment: I think it's possible (but not necessarily so) that AI and "data science" are emerging as academic fields and practical disciplines dependent on, but distinct from, computer science. I think this is similar to how computer science emerged as a distinct discipline from both electrical engineering and math.

Electrical engineering and hardware design didn't go away when computer science emerged - quite the contrary. One could be a computer scientist or a practicing software engineer without having a full backward in the underlying technologies (such as electrical and computer engineering, including computer architecture) and theoretical foundations (from the math side, although theoretical computer science clearly covers a lot of this). But for quite a long time, I think that computer science and the field of software were driving the most visible technological change in society and culture.

I wonder if that's no longer the case, and AI and data science are emerging "on top of" computer science. We may eventually have AI and/or data science academic departments that are distinct from the computer science department in a university. While there would certainly be an intersection of topics covered - just as there currently is with computer science and computer architecture and electrical engineering - I can see the needs of training a new AI and/or data science researcher and practitioner requiring a separate curriculum. I could see that happening if AI and/or data science become the dominant driver of technological change for society and culture in the same way generic "software" was during the latter half of the 20th century.

All of this is speculation, of course. But I think it's quite possible, and perhaps likely.

[mlazos]

I think that the way computer science emerged from EE is totally distinct to what’s happening right now. CS eventually abstracted away all of the electrical engineering aspects of the discipline and as a result you need no knowledge of digital logic design to study computer science. AI/ML I don’t think will ever be this way; you will always need CS knowledge in order to experiment/run/optimize your algorithms.

[scott_s]

Maybe! But I can foresee a future where this is not the case. I can imagine an electrical engineer in 1955 saying the same thing about software.

[mlazos]

So I thought about that scenario, I just don't think an EE can reasonably say that circuit design is necessary to understanding assembly programming. Further, by the time CS departments were created, it was definitely obvious that CS was distinct from EE, at this point I definitely don't think it's obvious that AI/ML will ever be distinct fields from computer science.

[scott_s]

Consider that in 1955 (the year I chose above), Fortran was still two years in the future. At this point in time, people were still wrapping their heads around the concept of a library of pre-existing routines that new programs could call. Compilers for algebraic languages pre-Fortran was even called "automatic programming" at the time. Also keep in mind that although the mid '50s was when software and computer science was emerging as a distinct discipline, it wasn't until the '60s that independent CS departments emerged and it took even longer for that to be the norm in most universities. Animats and osteele is a sibling thread have interesting anecdotes in this regard. So I think it's quite possible that electrical engineers at the time not seeing a future where people would think about software independent of hardware. (To see some documents from the time, I wrote about some my family had a while back: http://www.scott-a-s.com/grandfather-univac/)

I don't think it's obvious that AI and data science will be distinct fields from CS. I just think it's quite possible, and if it does happen, this is the time people will point to when it started emerging on its own.