Crossroads - Summer 2014

major. CS has fundamentally changed the way we live our lives. It straddles the new algorithms that will change the world in the future and the app you download on your smartphone today.

Technology has become so pervasive that we don’t even stop to think about it or notice the complex processing power we have in our pockets or in the cloud. But this invisibility may be both a feature and a liability.

How often do we as computer scientists stop to reflect on the ways computing technology is changing the world around us?

We may not have to do it alone: The
recent tech boom is changing how the
world looks at computer science, and
increasingly it looks on with a critical
eye. The NSA data monitoring scan-
dal has made consumers worry about
government intrusion and collabo-
ration with the tech industry. And
the leaders of large tech companies
have been implicated in colluding to
keep engineer wages down. Although
many users love AIRBNB and Uber
for making their lives easier, these
companies have also been viewed as
anti-regulatory and union busting.

Not to mention the media coverage
of drones, Google Glass, and a litany
of other issues, has only highlighted
games and communicate with friends and family across the globe, and getting gobbled up
by tech giants in the process. At Stanford University, computer science is now the largest