To Computer Science Colleagues in the UK
In order to evaluate the proposal, I tried peering into my googol-ball that takes me
into the future, turning the knob to the year 2106 and focusing on major educational
and research activities. Unfortunately at that distance things get a bit blurred, but
this is what I saw through the mists and swirls (I think).
There are some people giving inspiring lectures to large, enthusiastic classes of
first year students on varieties of information processing, in brains, in minds, in
ecosystems, in developing embryos, in social systems, in control of space-time
transporters, and also a few other application areas.
These students seem to be learning about multi-layered virtual machines of various
kinds, and also learning the recent history of how this sort of study stood
philosophy of mind on its head, revolutionised ideas about causation (because
processes in virtual machines cause and control most of the phenomena we find
interesting), transformed and unified a host of academic disciplines that used to be
in separate departments and also led to new cosmological theories, including the
latest proposal for combining relativity and quantum theory in an information
processing framework.
Information as inherently involving semantic content (reference, truth, falsity,
implication relations) has joined matter and energy as fundamental constituents of
reality though the relations between those three, and whether life has to be
something extra or merely a manifestation of their interaction remains controversial
in some quarters. There is a groundswell of support in a few religiously controlled
countries for compulsory teaching of the 'IL' theory (Irreducibility of Life Theory).
In the most internationally respected universities, students in the main science,
humanities, medical, and engineering fields, all come to university already having
had experience of designing, implementing, documenting, analysing, explaining, and
criticising a variety of information processing systems.
Most of the scientific, engineering and medical centres in universities expect their
students to spend much of their first year extending and deepening their general
understanding of such systems through more practical work, theoretical and modelling
studies of varieties of information processing systems in nature and to a lesser
extent in artifacts, and through an introduction to the new mathematics developed for
the study of multiple, changing, continuously interacting multi-level information
processing systems embedded in complex dynamic environments, especially Bornat's
theorem (2025) about the nearly cyclic growth and decay of multi-level interacting
attractor basins.
The practical modelling work by students is done in large central learning-support
virtual buildings (linking student accommodation and some core on-campus buildings
and machines, as well as portable terminals) in which students have access to the
latest ways of specifying, implementing, running, and analysing a wide range of types
of systems of varying complexity, including interacting with pre-built re-usable
environments modelling many different kinds of natural, engineered, and highly
fanciful entities including mythical creatures in infinite-dimensional worlds, and
virtual environments with hundreds of now extinct species at various stages of our
history.
Of course the students are expected not merely to play with these pre-built systems,
but to find out how they work, and also to modify, extend, or redesign them, always
producing analytical reports on what they have done and why and what they have
learnt.
I can't make out what sort of technology is used to underpin these systems but I find
it curious that besides what seem to be electrical power lines going into these
centres there also seem to be many tanks with different sorts of chemicals connected
to them and they appear to need large specialised exhaust systems. One of them has a
plaque: 'Homage to GC7'[*].
Almost all the student work is collaborative, sometimes across universities or
countries. Students get individually tailored automatically generated critical
reports on their work from the systems they interact with, and this forms a major
part of their assessment.
At various stages (about four times a year) students who deem themselves ready
diverge into a host of teaching and research centres many of them studying
information processing systems of special kinds, some natural some artificial -- e.g.
what used to be called biology, embryology, biochemistry, psychology, neuroscience,
economics, sociology, anthropology, management science, internet studies, and various
kinds of engineering -- some concerned with development of new kinds of physical or
chemical materials or mechanisms (many of them bio-inspired), others with various
kinds of virtual machines, most with a mixture.
The students all continue throughout their studies to take classes taught by the
General Theory (GT) departments which resulted from the merger around 2087 of
mathematics and philosophy, in which much of the research and teaching is concerned
with new conceptual frameworks and mathematical structures for understanding both
systems found in nature and also complex newly designed artificial systems including
the international Braindome and Evodome experiments, the latter in geostationary
orbit above the equator, and of course the galaxynet system under construction in the
largest international collaborative project in our history. I notice that a few
universities have departments labelled 'Semantic Galaxynet Studies' (SGS).
Staff and students from all departments help to specify requirements for, and some
also to design and implement, the learning support systems in the central learning
buildings, which are frequently updated.
A high proportion of them seem to be using technology developed at a non-profitable
Asian Corporation for Collaborative Open Technology (ACCOT), which for some reason
has its headquarters in Devon.
A few of the old pioneering universities have monuments commemorating what used to be
known as computer science and their role in helping to bring it into existence,
before it metamorphosed (between about 2025 and 2075) into the much broader
meta-discipline of IPS and computers became obsolete.
Most of the learned societies to which academics belong are special interest groups
within the ISSCIPS (International Society for the Study and Creation of Information
Processing Systems). There are some rebel sub-groups who try to preserve what used to
the British Psychological Society, The British Computer Society, The Institute of
Physics, The Mind Association, and several others, but they are having to face up to
the fact that their authority and status have diminished to the point that they are
merely tolerated as quaint relics.
Oh dear it has started to get much more fuzzy. I seem to have almost exhausted the
machine for today. (It's an early prototype accidentally left behind by some
time-travellers on a sight-seeing trip from 2206 and it seems to be getting more
flaky each time I use it). Just before it shut down I just managed to find a relic in
the Birmingham University archives of a document arising out of a CPHC meeting in
January 2000 discussing the future of research in CS in the UK
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/misc/cs-research.html
apparently last accessed on 27 Feb 2006.
Cheers.
Aaron
Installed: 27 Feb 2006
Updated: 3 Mar 2006; Updated: 22 Apr 2007 (Minor formatting);
31 Jul 2013 (Re-formatted)
Maintained by
Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham