I’m sure it says more about my imagination than the nature of future work, but I still can’t imagine anything one can meaningfully work on that can’t be either parallelized, or treated like a computer program. It makes it hard to think about the subject without a concrete example to wrap my head around.
Take 50 researchers working on related topics to improve an algorithm to do object recognition in industrial robots. Each topic involves lemmas building upon lemmas, experiments selected based on previous experiments, and other serial steps. The steps are different for the different subtopics. As intermediate results come in, communication and management are used to allocate resources between subtopics, to determine which researchers spend how much time explaining their work to one another to cross-fertilize insights, and so forth.
I’m sure it says more about my imagination than the nature of future work, but I still can’t imagine anything one can meaningfully work on that can’t be either parallelized, or treated like a computer program. It makes it hard to think about the subject without a concrete example to wrap my head around.
Take 50 researchers working on related topics to improve an algorithm to do object recognition in industrial robots. Each topic involves lemmas building upon lemmas, experiments selected based on previous experiments, and other serial steps. The steps are different for the different subtopics. As intermediate results come in, communication and management are used to allocate resources between subtopics, to determine which researchers spend how much time explaining their work to one another to cross-fertilize insights, and so forth.