It's been a couple of years, but now I'm back into a CS class. Advanced Computer Science: we're still figuring out the curriculum, but it should include much more thorough investigations of algorithms. I'm looking forward to it.
As an introduction, we watched the Ted Talk by Kevin Slavin: "How Algorithms Shape Our World." The idea is that stock trading algorithms, driven to within milliseconds (or microseconds!) of each other are starting to rely on physical distance for speed gains. The end result could very well be terraforming Earth for efficient computing. Scary, but true.
The takeaway? Unless you're comfortable governed by an unsupervised program (not that it's a bad thing), it's a good idea to know exactly what is happening. I'm glad I'm in this class.