<p>I’m leaning towards applying to colleges and universities as a computer science major, but I have a very important question:</p>
<p>How do computer science and the efforts of those in the industry make a positive impact in the world? In other terms, what problems does computer science solve in the world?</p>
<p>Thank you!</p>
<p>Positive: </p>
<p>Medical/biomedical research would be in a period of stagnation without computer science. It’s possible you will have an organ that speaks C++ when you’re older.</p>
<p>Same for the space program which relies heavily on physics modeling.</p>
<p>Computer scientists do very repetitive tedious work to make other professions (ie accounting) less repetitive/tedious and more automated.</p>
<p>Lots of other stuff.</p>
<p>Negative impact: </p>
<p>As computer science becomes more prolific, people who want to make money in completely unrelated fields (ie, ecology) find themselves learning python or something and writing macros at a computer all day or being jobless. The IDE is the new cubicle.</p>
<p>Similar to what television did for world culture (obliterated it), lots of youth do not experience life and spend all day online adopting warped world views as a silent spectator without ever developing a hands-on grasp of sociology, economics, or or how to detect obvious misinformation. Then they spend their adult lives programming with much the same result.</p>
<p>
That’s like saying Civil Engineers do a bunch of heavy lifting so that people have floors to stand on. It’s ridiculous.</p>
<p>Computer scientists determine what can be automated and how to automate. They increase the amount of knowledge which human beings have at their disposal, and with increased knowledge come new possibilities. Greater understanding is a worthy goal in itself.</p>
<p>Software engineers implement useful automations: to save time and money; to make processes more predictable and safer; to allow humans to do things human beings couldn’t do before. It’s the same as any kind of engineer: they make tools to make it easier for humans to get by, and to allow humans to do better than was previously possible.</p>
<p>Greater knowledge and more powerful tools can be used for good or bad; CS is not unique in this regard.</p>
<p>I write mobile farting apps.</p>
<p>I am fulfilled.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I can’t make sense out of this analogy.</p>
<p>I do notice I threw around the term “computer scientists” as a generic for people who major in computer science (should have just said programmers). </p>
<p>For some reason if you say “geographers” in reference to geography majors or “physicists” in reference to physics majors people know what you mean but programmers are hung up on the differences between arbitrary titles.</p>
<p>Other than that, what part do you object to? When I worked as a programmer undoubtedly the value of our work was that we were doing the tedious work in order to automate something for the business side. You don’t think that benefits society? I do. It was damn boring though.</p>
<p>^ The idea that writing software is inherently boring is preposterous. It is (or at any rate, can be) one of the purest expressions of creativity and problem solving that people actually get paid to do. If your experience is different, frankly, your experience isn’t representative.</p>
<p>Ask any disillusioned engineer and they might say the same thing: they do boring grunt work to make tools so others don’t have to. That’s not a particularly enlightening revelation.</p>
<p>I help design data respositories that can be used to hold INTEL information in order for the USA to catch international “bad guys” who may be a threat to our national security.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>…among other things :-)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Software engineering is a subset of CS. So computer scientists contribute on both sides :)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>this idea is so unique i have to ask what its provenance is</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s just a big Perl script :)</p>
<p>Today’s bad day at work - why is port 1443 blocked world wide?</p>