Its interesting that Gates is going around the US trying trying to get students pumped up on Computer Science. When asked if he would study CS Gates answered "computational biology" or "artificial intelligence". When asked if there could be another Microsoft he said - a breakthrough in AI would be 10x as big as MSFT.
By saying that Gates has basically admitted that the opportunites for big advances in CS for the next 15 years are limited.
To be really good at computational biology (aka Bioinformatics) you are better off with a MS degree in Biochemistry and learning python or perl for hacking.
With AI there hasn't been any breakthoughs in 20+ years when the hot stocks were all AI companies. Progress is slow. Handwriting recognition works ok. Voice/Vision recognition is limited. We are at the cockroach level and need to get to the human level. There are less actual jobs than in the 80s and the programming tools are more primative. (Java + C# vs LISP).
Marvin Minsky the grandfather of AI called AI Brain Dead and that there hasn't been much progress since the mid 1970s. According to him Clippy and OCR don't cut it.
Gates uses progress in hardware as a proxy for progress in computer programming.
* Harddrives with Terabytes of data
* LCD screens are getting cleaner and may be used as ebooks
* Wi-Max (802.16) extends connectivity from 200 feet to 30 miles.
* SPOT watch which receives data via FM
Web services standards are supposed to be the next big thing in software according to Gates. His example was scheduling. When will Microsoft open Outlook/Exchange to webservices? I see proprietary companies loath to open their proprietary APIs.
Personally I think that real opportunities are in "disruptive technologies". Open Source and specifically applying OpenSource to Financial Services. Or perhaps students should just follow the opportunist Larry Elison's recommendation and get into Biotech.
Larry: "This is just the beginning of the biotech revolution. It's going to change our world even more than computers did."
Posted by Anthony at March 1, 2004 02:21 PM | TrackBack