Computer Science Colloquium

Technology has had an immense impact on society. Imagine for just a moment that you were living in 1900: you have no electricity or the equipment it powers, you have no car, telephone, radio, television or myriad other "necessities" of modern life. There's a 50% chance that you live on a farm. Your life expectancy is 46. The changes that these fruits of engineering have brought go much deeper than simply a better quality of life - they affect the very fabric of our national and international social structure.

The odds are that 2100 will be "more different" from 2000 than 2000 is from 1900, implying even greater social changes. Technology does not determine the future - it enables many futures! The one we actually get will be determined by policies affecting how that technology is deployed and used. I am disturbed that engineers and scientists, those with the best chance of anticipating and understanding the technological changes that will precipitate these social changes, are largely absent from policy making. This talk will try to focus on the kinds of profound changes that we should be actively involved in guiding - and what you can do about it!

Dr. Wm. A. Wulf has been on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department and is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. His early work on large scale multiprocessor systems at Carnegie-Mellon University is a precursor to the Beowulf cluster architectures which are commonly used today for large scale parallel processing. He serves as the President of the National Academy of Engineering where he recently was elected to a new term of office. He is a Fellow of the NAE and ACM.