Maxwell’s Demon, Schrodinger’s Cat, and Broca’s Brain: Gate keepers to the Future of Computing - Livestream

The computer revolution, known by the moniker Moore’s Law, is rolling past its fifty-year march. As one of the most significant advancements of human civilization, this revolution has been enabled by a confluence of breakthroughs in science and engineering. Now this progress is at cross-roads facing slowing down of traditional scaling, advent of Artificial Intelligence as a general-purpose solution, and onset of Quantum Computing as an alternate computing paradigm. For us to navigate forward intelligently, we may need to go back and question what computing is (or should be) and how we could use this understanding differently.

In this presentation, I will propose that the path forward is gated by the known principles of science, together with the constraints imposed by engineering and technology. The quest for and the handling of information might become the unifying theme for a new vision on what computing will evolve into as a discipline. I will also conclude with a few perspectives on getting past the gate keepers to traverse this journey that could evolve computing to endless possibilities from a few beginnings.

Speaker: Sadasivan Shankar, Harvard

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