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The student

Imagine a student now entering university. The `nerd culture' is part of his or her culture. It could not be otherwise. What does this student expect of a university education? What do we expect of this student?

It is a time honoured tradition in academe to lament that students are not what they once were. But this just isn't true in any important way. In terms of intelligence and motivation little has changed since ancient Greece.

Students have always enjoyed, and will always enjoy, the contemplative and the puzzling. And, they have always been, and will always be, interested in personal gain - whether financial, or affiliation with an elite, or fame, or power for its own sake. It is no accident, for example, that students appearing in the Platonic dialogues are intent on honing their rhetorical and dialectical skills so as to acquire and wield political power. Nor is it coincidence that the elite of Athenian society would charge Socrates not just with impiety but also with the corruption of their youth. One can imagine the appeal of a classical education to a youth in classical times.

Our principal means to give meaningful power to students is through specialization. Acquiring some mastery of a subject requires spending considerable time immersed in it, exploring a terrain so well that it not only becomes familiar but that one can at least imagine how it might be extended into new territory. This is an intellectual power that every educated person should experience. Even so, a specialization which cannot assure the student a certain success in society after graduation will be avoided, if not shunned.

Natural science might still provide that path to success but the nerd culture has already informed students that computer science delivers in spades! It is fresh, exciting, important, modern and has yet to experience its Chernobyl.

Like earlier times in the natural sciences, the nerd culture presents an encouraging and friendly face. Internet newsgroups and the like provide a supportive and competitive forum for neophytes and experts alike. Recall nineteenth century science, when letters to Nature might recount the strange behaviour of a gentleman's dog, or describe flora and fauna observed on a trip abroad.

Start up costs are minimal. One achieves 0 to 60% effectiveness in real world application remarkably fast. Many budding computer science students make money with these skills before reaching university - graduate specialization is unnecessary. Think of the feedback to the student: older generations are amazed and the skills transfer easily to almost any area of application!

Intellectually, general purpose computers are machines which manipulate symbols - some of these just happen to represent floating point numbers. The technology is extremely malleable and so provides a new medium for representing ideas, expressing relationships, and modelling just about anything. The only bounds are the imagination and the finite but very large number of states.

This is power - power with some immediacy. Joseph Weizenbaum expressed it first, and best, as follows:

The computer programmer, however, is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. So, of course, is the designer of any game. But universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. Moreover, and this is a crucial point, systems so formulated and elaborated act out their programmed scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behaviour. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.

Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976, p.115.

Of course, Lord Acton's dictum applies. That this power corrupts was Weizenbaum's point, applied to the often over-reaching claims of Artificial Intelligence.


next up previous
Next: Challenges Up: Cultural shifts:Humanities to science Previous: Shift in culture

2000-01-28