Back to the 90's

The current state of computer science reminds me of the early excitement of the Internet in the mid-90's. By the beginning of the 90's, computers landed in many homes and most offices. Computers had modems, connected through the phone lines. Various online service networks, CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, MSN, started up which provided some basic information and communication but were mostly walled gardens. 

But then came the mosaic web browser in 1993. There weren't many web pages and they looked awful. There is a special place in hell for whomever invented the <blink> tag. But the ability to link to other pages, local or anywhere else on the web, was a game changer. I quickly created a web page so people could download my papers, to try it out and because I got tired of responding to email requests for them. People experimented with all different kinds of things on the web. Companies tried to figure out what to put on web pages. The online service networks reluctantly put browsers on their sites.

In the mid-90's the Internet was exciting but messy. Search engines would brag about the number of pages they searched but the ranking lacked relevance. Every CS job talk in every subarea, including theory, focused on the Internet. VC money flowed into Internet-related companies no matter how silly. It wasn't until Google using the PageRank algorithm gave us a good search engine, the dot-com bust drove out the bad companies and cloud computing gave us good platforms that we got to the Internet we have today, for better or for worse.

We're at that messy stage with machine learning. We can see the game-changing potential of the technology but far too many problems limit our ability to use them. VC money flows into new ML startups while our traditional Internet companies are shedding jobs. Will the transformers paper be this generation's PageRank or do we need another trick to take the next step? If the Internet is any guide, we'll get past this early stage, the market will shake out, only to develop even more challenges down the line.