Fran Blanche Musing on The Future of Computing

My comment:

6:45 Why isn't this talked about? I remember my friend Markus Kuhn at Cambridge was writing pieces for a blog called The Conversation, which was was funded by the Betty and Gordon Moore foundation or whatever they called their philanthropical effluence outlet back in 2015. Betty and Gordon Moore paid for the library at the University of Cambridge Center for Mathematical Sciences in 1999/2000. The big problem is as you say that these problems are each being addressed within certain disciplines and there isn't enough intersection between the different disciplines to approach them in an holistic way. So you don't have people thinking about the thermodynamics of computation and software architecture and programming methodology and system and sub-system level integration all at the same time. But you have to, because these things all impact each other. It's interesting that after they raised funds for the CMS the Computer Laboratory got about $75 million from Bill Gates and went their own way, in their own building, called the William Gates II building, which was next door to Microsoft Research on a separate site a few hundred yards away from the CMS. But even though they were quite close together there was hardly anything I would call collaboration between them. The Computer Laboratory just turned itself into a machine for producing graduate students for the PhD machine which fed Microsoft Research postdoc researchers who were rather well-paid but never really did that much, as far as I could tell. I saw from that Raspberry Pi video about the history of the company, https://youtu.be/eiwm5TMHIy8 that applications to study computer science at Cambridge quadrupled in 2011 which was after I left in 2009, so I don't know what it's like now. I guess the Computer Laboratory or whatever it's called now still gets the lion's share of UK research funding. I wonder what it's like at CMU, MIT and Princeton? Same deal: feed the corporate monster your finest minds?

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See also David MacQueen on The History of the Standard ML Programming Language, Jade on Time and Information, Navajo Traditional Teachings on Truth and Error and Ho hum, ....


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