“Computer Science is the future”, they used to say.
And despite being still emphatically present today, and will be also in the foreseeable future, at the same time we cannot but notice that things change, especially for that CS part closer to Computing. In some sense, this is for all the range of information sciences.*
The more things get industrialized and automatized, there are two paths for one to choose from. The first is to invest in making this happen, meaning to ride the technological wave, be among the first who does this or that, intensify production, etc., and get your share from the reduction of production costs.
The alternative is to give more emphasis to intellectual depth and width, to promote creativity, the making of fundamental ideas, and the foundation for many of those -in the scientific world- is the cultivation of our mathematical culture.
Food for thought as this affects us in all levels, institutional and personal.
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- One of the important factors for the drop presented in the plot is that coding (programming, familiarity and accesibility to dev infrastructures) has gradually becoming part of the typical skillset for a range of intersecting fields, mathematicians, physicists, engineers… I remember when, not more than 10 years ago, we had to introduce our maths students to basic computing tools (e.g. how to use an OS, how to write Latex, how to create slides), and now most of them know those things already when entering the school… Of course those are not professional computer scientists or software developers, but the spread of the coding culture means that many coding tasks can be handled by experts of the field, and in a more comprehensive way regarding the ends of a project (rather than taking a coder and try to explain him the purpose of what he is asked to do).
