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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

I think I now know how the electrical engineers felt in the '50s and '60s.

So that's what that feeling in my gut is. I'm struggling to find the time to learn ML/AI. This is another red flag to me that I should have been on this long ago.

I think it's time to say, as Arnold does, to break the rules and do this at work.

AI is large enough a field to warrant a new, dedicated track. In practice, as of current times, AI R&D/academia are enabled (perhaps even fueled) largely by the "traditional" constructs of computer science.

In my opinion, as time goes by and advancements are made, the coupling should grow weaker - and so we'll reach a point where there would be a more clear distinction between the two tracks, and they won't share much of the same curriculum, similarly to where we stand today with CS and electrical engineering.

Can you extrapolate on this a bit more? I understand the meaning but it seems different no?

Expanding even more upon a reply to a sibling comment: I think it's possible (but not necessarily so) that AI and "data science" are emerging as academic fields and practical disciplines dependent on, but distinct from, computer science. I think this is similar to how computer science emerged as a distinct discipline from both electrical engineering and math.

Electrical engineering and hardware design didn't go away when computer science emerged - quite the contrary. One could be a computer scientist or a practicing software engineer without having a full backward in the underlying technologies (such as electrical and computer engineering, including computer architecture) and theoretical foundations (from the math side, although theoretical computer science clearly covers a lot of this). But for quite a long time, I think that computer science and the field of software were driving the most visible technological change in society and culture.

I wonder if that's no longer the case, and AI and data science are emerging "on top of" computer science. We may eventually have AI and/or data science academic departments that are distinct from the computer science department in a university. While there would certainly be an intersection of topics covered - just as there currently is with computer science and computer architecture and electrical engineering - I can see the needs of training a new AI and/or data science researcher and practitioner requiring a separate curriculum. I could see that happening if AI and/or data science become the dominant driver of technological change for society and culture in the same way generic "software" was during the latter half of the 20th century.

All of this is speculation, of course. But I think it's quite possible, and perhaps likely.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What do you mean?

He's referring to the newly-created "computer science" degrees. The thought must be: why create a degree for a subfield of my field?

That was when computer science emerged as an academic discipline distinct from the design and implementation of computers themselves; up to that point, an electrical engineer probably had the confidence that they were at the forefront of technological change.

I think he's referencing the beginning of "Computer Science" degrees. Computers were researched by electrical engineers and mathematicians before.

Yes. My undergraduate diploma says "Electrical Engineering - Computer Science". Computer science wasn't a full department yet.

Mine says “Linguistics”. I took CS graduate courses, but there wasn't an undergraduate major yet.

My father-in-law had a math degree and was a math professor, and then an EE professor — the latter while he co-founded an AI lab, that hired physics major Richard Stallman and other non-CS-majors.

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