[georgewsinger]

Almost all of the answers on this list are not fields that are "emerging" but fields that "have already emerged".

The ideal emerging field is one that's so obscure we haven't heard of it yet, but so important that we will. If there are widely disseminated books on Amazon about your field, it's not emerging. If there are hundreds of professionals cranking out papers about your field, it's also not emerging.

Emerging fields are underrated and under-recognized. What are they?

[xamuel]

On the philosophical side, I recently published a paper which could potentially lead to a whole new genre: making actual scientific (=falsifiable) progress on the previously-ineffable question, "Do we live in a simulation?"

"A type of simulation which some experimental evidence suggests we don't live in" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf

[tlb]

The x - ˆx property is very easy to avoid when building a simulator. Most server-grade computers already use error correcting codes for their memory. Or, the simulator could just abort and restart at a recent checkpoint if an error is detected. It's possible to detect errors with arbitrarily low false-negative rate for a small additional cost of computing and storing checksums.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting observation that we can now easily do experiments that demonstrate correct behavior of logic to the 10^-15 level. If Descartes were looking for evidence of the fallibility of a daemon creating his sense data, it would have been hard to demonstrate better than 10^-3 or 10^-4.

[xamuel]

You're right of course. Nevertheless there's a difference between saying "the simulating computer probably uses error-correcting codes or something" (speculation) vs. saying "an experiment suggests (same thing)" (science).

To borrow from Nick Bostrom: suppose we run two types of simulations. Important simulations and un-important simulations. For the important sims, we use error-correcting codes, we save checkpoint images, etc. For the unimportant sims, we don't do those things, in order to save money. This allows us to run far more unimportant sims than important sims. Thus, if someone is incarnated randomly in one of the sims, it's probably one of the cheap ones (just because there are more cheap sims than important sims, by basic economics). The point is just to show that it is possible for a philosopher to argue against error-correcting codes etc. Indeed, if we leave it to philosophers, we'll probably never make progress.

We need to appeal to the muse of science, that harsh mistress who serves us cold hard facts, every single one of which throws 50% of philosophers out into the darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth :)

[Norther]

Perhaps I should have asked for the most obscure :) I wonder how many truly emerging fields still exist within computer science. I feel that resiros [1] may be correct in suggesting applications in other areas of science are most interesting / obscure (in the context of that discipline, at least).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17696498

[cptaj]

I disagree. It depends on where you draw the line and that is entirely subjective. For you, its when no textbooks are written, but for the purposes of this discussion I think it would be more useful to talk about fields that are not so mainstream yet but that we have enough material to discuss.

Its just a catch phrase, there is no real objective boundary

[otakucode]

I see several responses that are of truly emerging fields. The one I decided to mention, amorphous computing, has been around for a few years but hasn't gained much traction. It's hard to drive discussions around tech that by definition not many know about or understand or have much input on...