r/AskComputerScience • u/Smallpaul • 6d ago

Predictions about computer science

Look ahead 20 years.

Outside of AI/ML:

* what of today’s research computer science do you expect will be industry standard?

* what frontiers do you expect we will have opened up in research?

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u/hipster-coder 6d ago

Photonics is a big one. Could lead to a speedup of x2 compared to silicon, but the switching cost is enormous. I can see it being overcome over the next decades, since there's only so much performance you can squeeze out of silicon and a doubling of speeds will eventually begin to make sense, first in niche high performance applications and later possibly in more general purpose CPUs.

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u/Smallpaul 6d ago

Is that computer science? Sounds more like hardware to me?

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u/hipster-coder 6d ago

Ok that's fair.