The Future of Computing

I'm currently attending the yearly conference of the German computing society, GI. It looked like a great day with lots of keynotes about the future of computing. The first keynote was, indeed, wonderful Barbara Liskov, at 72, one of the pioneers in computing who noted that people had complained about her receiving the Turing Award in 2009: But what she wrote is trivial, that't the way we do things today! Right, her work was instrumental in getting us away from gotos and global variables and into good programming practices!

Then things started to turn down. Lots of wonderful things we are expecting to soon see in medicine and automotive engineering (Braunschweig is near Wolfsburg = Volkswagen). Lots of things that scare the stuffing out of me because of the things that can go wrong if we blithely implement these technologies without thinking. Medical data freely available. Sensors in our living spaces to see if we are doing alright. Transportation bizarrness.

But wait, we can't even get the present to work properly. There are exactly two electrical outlets for the entire Audiorium maximum of a TECHNICAL university. I'm hogging one right now, in order to write this and fill up on electricity for the afternoon session ;)