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by mlazos 2967 days ago
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.
1 comments
scott_s 2967 days ago
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.
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mlazos 2967 days ago
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.
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scott_s 2967 days ago
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.

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