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On the Future of Science
bj8rn writes "Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, speculates about the future of science based on a talk he have gave a few weeks ago. Kelly sees recursion as the essence of science and chronicles the introduction of different recursive devices in science; projecting forward from this, he makes several interesting predictions about what the near future may hold in store. Some highlights: there will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years; the new century will be the century of Biology; new ways of knowing will emerge, with 'Wikiscience' leading to perpetually refined papers with thousands of authors."
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
the new century will be the century of Biology;
This will be interesting considering that the current administration has for the first time in 30 years, reduced the funding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and not allowed its budget to keep up with inflation and shows their lack of commitment to bioscience research. I predict this damage will take at least 10 years to repair.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
hemos
The advent of Wikiscience causes science to be erased by anonymous vandals, new Stone Age ensues.
In summary, Science will not stop being science and will continue to be science. In much the same manner and tone. Also there are kooky new methods of doing research and coming to collaborative findings. Including methods of gathering massive amounts of data very quickly. Some scientists will be assholes, some won't And on a bizarre note, Science will stop being objective, will be based more upon personal feeling towards the subject matter, and would appear to throw the scientific method out the window. This is not me, its a brief summary of the article. I think this is strange and some of it seems to hedge on mass eugenics and 'Big Brother' type 24 hour observation.
Seems to me that as time goes on, the more quickly things change. This is true for pretty much anything, not just science and tech. Maybe you can predict what the next 5 or 10 years will be like, but I don't think you can claim that "The new century will be the century of Biology." With such a high rate of change, it's likely that there will be a radical change within the next decade. At which point, people will then make a new prediction for the rest of the century.
End transmission.
This will be interesting considering that the current administration has for the first time in 30 years, reduced the funding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and not allowed its budget to keep up with inflation and shows their lack of commitment to bioscience research. I predict this damage will take at least 10 years to repair.
An honest question: What exactly makes you assume the next century of scientific advancement will happen in America?
It will be a great and sad loss if America decides to abdicate its position as scientific and technological leader of the world-- which seems to be exactly what is happening, between decreasing public funding; the decreased public perception of the importance of science; the increased difficulty foreign academics are facing under the new and restrictive INS policies of the last four years; and the raft of arbitrary and ignorance-fueled restrictions Congress has placed on bioscience research (while still somehow expecting innovative results).
But if America does decide to go the route it is currently on and abandon its position as science leader, the rest of the world can move on without us. It will just take a little bit of time to reshuffle things.
*Sigh* Wiki is a wonderful tool for certain applications. When you want breadth of knowledge and are willing to accept a certain amount of uncertainty on accuracy of knowledge, wiki is a great tool. When you want narrow focus and little uncertaintly on accuracy, wiki sucks. Using wiki for this is like using .NET for low level, speed intensive applications.... a great tool for the wrong job.
I do not want to read a science paper put together by a committee. Can you imagine a natural selection paper written by the masses? Truth is not a democratic sport. I'd rather read two papers contradicting each other than one paper written by those two parties. IN the former case, I can easily compare and contract. In the later, I am forced to sift through revision histories to try to piece together original intent.
Add in the "lol, jews" camp, and we are back in the middle ages.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
We must also consider the effects religion will have on scientific advancement.
He speaks of biology. What we see today is religious individuals and organizations taking a very active stand against such research. This is especially true in the United States. Christian fundamentalist groups have had a truly astounding effect. Between getting religious dogma (in the form of 'intelligent design') taught in science classes, and the outright prevention of stem cell research, they have become the greatest hinderence to scientific progress.
We will likely see such progress happen anyways, however. It just won't be in America. Countries like China, and to a lesser extent India, will soon become the hubs of scientific research. Instead of them sending their best and brightest students to America for an education, we may see it go the other way.
I think he's wrong about Biology beiung next. Not because it's not interesting (it is), but because we still have so much farther we can go with IT. Each new tech area gets overhyped and then crashes expectations, then the reality catches up with the hype. Only now, in the last 1-2 year have we seen an emergence of the real power of the Internet (and it's long-hyped power) being realized by large numbers (%'s) of people. By "real power" I mean structured data encoding for all useful information - persistent global connectivity enabling virtual organizations - and (what I call "The greatest shift") the realization by society that information is more valuble than physical goods.
The next 20 years will one of vast social change, enabled by computing and communications technology. The social change will be driven by a realization that basic physical goods to support life are of such low value compared to information that it's in the best interest of large social groups (governements) to feed and house people effectively for free - and harness their THINKING ability toward global value instead of their more classic PRODUCTION value. This will radically alter our view of work and production. Mental participation at a basic level will sustain large groups of people at minimal levels (housing,food) for the value that simple participation will generate.
In terms of biology and biotech - yes, it's exciting - but by comparison to the aboe radical changes in our society, the technology for biological change is still really really hard. We don't have the ability to probe deeply enough, the systems we measure are noisy and all unique, so while there will be advances, they will not shift our lives so much os the shift happeneing because everyone is talking. Spending 30 minutes looking at Myspace will give you an indication of the amount of energy the NEXT generation will be willing to put into connecting online.
Triple-blind experiments will emerge through massive non-invasive statistical data collection--- no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later.
Won't this have a slight effect on the quality of data that's gathered (or lack thereof)?
This guy's the limit!
I think that saying that "the next 50 year will see more progress than the past 400" although being true, it's a major understatement.
If you see Moorse's law as applied to electronics, and the similiar explossive exponential growth we see in all areas of human development, and you extrapolate the available data, you will see that even the next 20 years will see more progress than the past millions of years of human and non-human-derived evolution. Not only will we see major revolutions in biology, but in nanotechnology, robotics, and true artificial intelligence as well.
I also believe that most of us alive today will either get to live for a very long time (at least 1000 years) or indefinitelly as we morph into non-biological entities, where the most important thing will be our minds, and we'll probably spend more time in virtual environments than in the "real" one we experience today. I also believe we'll trascend our human ways into more sublime ways, but will continue to call ourselves "humans" even when we leave behind our biological bodies. I also think this will provide us with more insight into the nature of "reality", and we (and others like us in the universe if they exist) will probably be the determining factor in shaping the future of the universe, and thus of our own existence.
And yes, I have read Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" and agree with a good deal of what it says.
He's an old hippie and he don't know what to do
Should he hang on to the old
Should he grab on to the new
He's an old hippie...his new life is just a bust
He ain't trying to change nobody
He's just trying real hard to adjust
-- Bellamy Brothers
Science is the practice of using long words to make things that explode, and is the number three cause of deaths in Americans under 45. Science is performed by Scientists, a cannabalistic but peaceful race who resemble rats more than humans and live deep before the earth. By far the most important scientist today is Pope John Ratzinger, inventor of DNA. Without science, life would not be possible and we would all have to live in big piles of stacked rocks, because we wouldn't be able to invent nails or hammers or wood.
Resources
* "The Vatican Website". Biography of Pope John Ratzinger.
* "U.S. Department of Defense". The inventors of science, and giant laser enthusiasts.
* "NEWTON BBS Ask A Scientist". This site is crap. I don't know why we're linking it but everyone on the talk page is a huge fanboy for it so there you go.
* "Herbal viagra". Herbal viagra cheap grow a bigger today.
Show me anywhere in history that lack of freedom has corresponded to scientific achievement
Change to "broad based scientific achievement". For example in some areas, the Soviet Union was superior to the rest of the world. But by and large, they lagged the west. If science wasn't in the "people's interest" (as defined by a core communist group), then it wasn't worth funding.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Wow, I don't know you, but your post seems..., well, underinformed. First of all, you are ARE a monkey, all humans are. We are animals like all the rest on this rock. God is a story created by fearful and ignorant men. Belief in a sentient creator flys in the face of all rational observation. I would welcome the opportunity to talk to a God if it existed, but all evidence says it does not.
Second, we will have human-competitive reasoning engines based on silicon within 15 years. No doubt in my mind. There is no technical barrier to this now, it's simply a coding and organization task that can be accomplished by the coordinated efforts of large groups of people and a small dedicated groups of programmers.
The Internet will not be the brain, it will provide the external information source and training sets.
Can you imagine the invasion of privacy that would be required to get that kind of data on that many people?
Sure, they can match the cigarettes you buy when you use your bank card
They would have to monitor 100,000 people, 24/7 and record EVERYTHING from where you worked, live, travelled to what you ate and where you bought it (and where it was produced and what chemicals were used on it).
And that won't even allow you to try to isolate the variables. Once you get into multiple variables (dosage, exposure rate, etc), you don't have a valid experiment anymore.
He's confused "science" with "demographics".
This is TOTALLY wrong, I 'thought' of wikiscience last year... patent pending... nuff said :)
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Just because it is a wiki does not mean that it has to provide global write access.
It is quite possible to create a wiki under which some or all pages are restricted in editing to a small group of trusted individuals. I have been involved with research projects in which project files and documents were hosted on a private wiki with access only available to project members; in this context the wiki became essentially just a shared drive for project files, only more convenient to access and with rich change tracking features. It is not hard to imagine similar tools being used to augment or replace the traditional peer review process; I'm doubtful as to exactly what benefit such a change would briung, but if some thought is given to the idea it is certainly a possibility.
P.S.: You're right though, Kevin Kelly is on crack. I mean, come on. The editor of Wired? Why the hell is anybody even listening to this guy? When was the last time Wired was right about anything?
we are at peace and happy
have you read the news lately?
That is not true. People were created by God, in His image. We did not decend from monkeys.
For evolution to happen, it would be like taking a watch and hitting it with a hammer until it was broken into a thousand peices, and then putting those peices in a bag and shaking the bag so the watch is magically put back together.
God is a story created by fearful and ignorant men.
God walked the earth, he was here. His name was Jesus. People saw him, he healed the sick, he walked on water, and he rose from the dead. There were witnesses to His actions.
Belief in a sentient creator flys in the face of all rational observation
No, everything a rational observer looks at gives proof that God does exist. He made everything, and when we look at a beautiful flower or the stars in the sky, we see our Creators work.
Without God, we would not exists. We're here because of his love.
I Have The Power
Why is the parent flamebait? There are people--many people--who believe those things. I don't: I'm an atheistic monkey-descendant. But there are many, many people who do. Who is to say that Baseball_Fan isn't one of them?
have you read the news lately?
I wrote those who are true to Gods love are at peace and happy. The reason there is suffering is because we have turned our back on God's instructions. Look at how our society has changed the past 20 years. We let gays think they are okay, when in fact they are sick. We let women kill their babies, and call it abortion. We don't take care of the poor in society. And we expect a reward for being enlightened with science?? Science is not all knowing, it can not tell us what is right and wrong.To be happy, we need to do Gods will. If we follow his direction, and love, we will be happy and at peace.
It takes alot more than optimism to create a machine that works like the human brain. The computer is based on the Turing Machine. Automata theory states that the Turing Machine can accomplish a certain subset of problems in the mathematical world, and no computer can be more powerful than the Turing no matter what complexity of algorithms is used. It's not a matter of processing power or hardware, it's the very nature of computing. The human brain on the other hand can a)Recognize this fact. b)Solve some of these problems. You believe the brain has come as a result of the acumulation of millions of random mutations. I will not argue the point, but at least leave room for other possibilities.
Those "<insert some area here> is the next big thing" predictions are always BS. They happen because on the past we had a big thing. That was physics, but on the pas we didn't have much more than physics. Nowadays, we have plenty of areas that can lead to great opportunities, and need to (and will) explore all of them.
No old area lose (scientifical or economical) importance, and no new area is much bigger than the old ones. But the oposite is true, normaly, new areas normaly are quite small, and when they manage to grow, there is no more hype on them.
Rethinking email
But, if we view this as the century of biology, imagine what kind of data analysis will be possible on that material when IT develops further. Imagine the transformation of society if genetic modification of humans got commonplace in the 2040's. Imagine what combined organic/electronic implants could do.
As usual people predicting over 100 years are likely to be almost completely wrong.
I find particularly shortsighted to predict big advances in biology while at the same time recognizing the central role of computer sciences. Most advances in biology now are direct consequences of technological advances on other fields like physics and maths. It is not difficult to predict big advances in nanotechnologies that follow from previous advances in basic sciences as well.
Then I see no reason to believe that advances in basic sciences will slow down. Just what is happening now for example in quantum physics is likely to modify computer science (quantum computer) and other technologies (microscopy) in drastic ways well within 50 years. The relative impact of such developments wrt biology is just impossible to predict.
Why not?
Rethinking email
We routinely think thoughts that would be impossible for the cave people or even the people of the middle ages. One of the most mind numbing things I ever read was the "The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas". It took me a while to realize that these people didn't even think the way we now do. Their basic assumptions were quite different. Imagine trying to explain relativity to someone from 1800. So, I tend to agree. We will find different ways of thinking about things.
the new century will be the century of Biology;
Not to bash biology and medicine, but we need breakthru's in physics and AI to progress to the next stage. We need phyz to break free of oil, and AI to allow things such as solar farms and efficient remote construction in space. Maybe AI would allow us to build solar farms and mining colonies throughout the solar system. In short, we need plentiful energy and slave-like-labor (AI) to really "build out" as the human race. Biology will only give us incremental progress.
Table-ized A.I.
Do you have any real grasp on scientific methods? You know: observe, model, predict and check? And searching, not for data that supports your theory, but data that contradicts it?
The fact that you get your guidance in life from a book, with questionable heritage, for no other reason than the book telling you should, indicates that you are misguided, most probably indoctrinated from childhood.
I hope you live a happy life, however small your worldview. But I hope even more that you get an education and learn to think for yourself.
More like the last century of biology!
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
These guys seem to have a pretty weird idea of what Wikipedia is. It's chock full of errors and trash, badly written and formulated articles, and sometimes it's hard to tell if someone is lying or not. I work on Wikipedia, but there's no way that this form of document creation is ever going to be as reliable, credible and well-sourced as single/couple authored documents, and I don't think it was even meant to be.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Unless this was seriously sarcastic and I failed to pick up on it, get the fuck off this site. I'm sick of you religious idiots.
well, underinformed. First of all, you are ARE a monkey, all humans are
You seem to be even more "underinformed". Humans are not monkeys, we are APES. And no, it is not the same thing.
At the risk of my Karma (and I notice the irony in that statement), could you please explain to me how Jesus = God? I seem to recall according to the bible Jesus = God's Son, and didn't he himself say that he wasn't God, just the celestial equivalent of a messenger boy? I've never had this satisfactorily explained....
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
For evolution to happen, it would be like taking a watch and hitting it with a hammer until it was broken into a thousand peices, and then putting those peices in a bag and shaking the bag so the watch is magically put back together.
In case you haven't noticed, a watch isn't alive. It has no desire to grow or improve. It doesn't care wether it's functioning properly, or broken down to it's component molecules. Life does. For one thing, we can see clear signs of human adaptation. People in warm, sunny climates have darker skin than those living in colder climates. Humans living at high altitudes have expnaded lung capacity. People living in extremely cold climates have smaller bodies with shorter limbs than those living in warm climates. We see small changes on those levels all the time. Bological changes DO occur in response to the environment; that much is undeniable. The only thing you can legitemately question is whether or not evolution occurs on a larger scale, creating entirely new species over time. But the fact that micro-evolution can be logicaly demonstrated to have occured is enough to make your watch analogy absolutely useless. Watches do not procreate and change to suit their environment.
No, everything a rational observer looks at gives proof that God does exist. He made everything, and when we look at a beautiful flower or the stars in the sky, we see our Creators work.
I've yet to see a flower or a star with the words "God wuz here" writen on it. Even if I were to see it, I'd suggest it's mainly evidence that someone with a magic-marker was really bored. There is no evidence of God. If you wish to beleive in him/her/it, that's your choice, however, claiming that you have evidence of it only illustrates the fact that you have no idea what the word "evidence" means. As such, any rational discussion with you is largely a waste of time.
Why can't everyone be a thought worker? Because, statistically, half of the people on the earth will be always stupider than the other half. So, while the upper crust is pushing the frontiers of human knowledge forward, the lowest-of-the-low will be complaining about how everyone should be able to be thought workers.
Why not?
Because about 5 billion are using most of their thinking ability just to sustain themselves. And it's only going to get worse as the Earth's populstion increases and more and more resources are taxed to their limits. And no, I don't believe "technology", "advances", or any other sooth saying (cop-out) predictions will be able to rescue us. Saying so would be almost as foolish as saying that God will save us.
See: Diamond
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Dude, it doesn't take intelligence to draw a drawing, or write a program.
A lack of government research should actually open up doors for private research. I think this will take a lot longer than 10 years to repair. As the private research turns out product, they will make more money to fund more private research.
Not only will it take more than 10 years to repair, but it will also deprive many people of fantastic medicine. That medicine might be in the form of artificial limbs or repair of brain damage. It might be processes that will make an 80 year old body function like a 20 year old body. We might have all been dead before these things were discovered, but without help from the government there is little hope we'll be alive.
10 years? We might need to cross our fingers and hope that we walk away from this with a mindset where the government should be facilitating or even funding research.
Natural resources and space will still be relatively scarce, while everybody has the capacity to understand and interpret ideas. Information will never be worth more in an economic sense than physical goods. What you espouse would be closest to the replicator-driven society of Star Trek, where any sort of matter can be transmuted into anything else. That might cause information to become more valuable to people, but it will still cost less in terms of energy to copy and understand the design specifications of something than it will to create it.
Why not?
Because a significant number of us will have to be thought police.
And you're going away for a looong time for even thinking otherwise.
A. Bester
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
You have obviously not met most of those 6 billion people.
-CGP
Humans are neither, we're HUMANS. This meme is worse than the US's pseudo-Christianity, clearly the people pushing this have no idea what they're talking about. Can humans breed with apes? Can humans breed with monkeys? Evolution doesn't mean that a ape morphed into a human somewhere along time. It means we have common ancestors. Just like humans and E. coli share common ancestors.
We never would have made it into space without Nazis: SS-Sturmbannführer Werner von Braun ("I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."), Major-General Dr Walter Robert Dornberger, Konrad Dannenberg (deputy program manager, Saturn booster), Kurt Debus (first head of Kennedy Space Center), Guenter Wendt ("The Fuhrer of the Pad"), and over a hundred others from the Nazi rocket program. Those were the people who created the Space Age.
Since all the old Nazis died off, NASA hasn't designed and built a single successful new launch vehicle.
The Soviet atomic bomb program was headed by Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, Stalin's head of the secret police. Even though they had some help from espionage, they did have a successful project. And the Soviet H-bomb was original, not a copy of a US design. Accounts by people from the Soviet bomb project indicate that he was a terrifying boss, but neither stupid nor unnecessarily brutal.
Remember folks, an educated public is BAD for any government trying to maintain control. Those pesky "educated" folks have a tendency to gum up the works. They're BAD for the country, and thus must be stopped.
The best way to d this if course is to ensure that Only the wealthy can get decent educations. That way anyone who doesn't fit the mold can simply find their business opportunities dry up. The, and their degenerate ideas, will be dead and gone withing a generation!
Isn't it brilliant?
Besides, a lead in science and technology is overrated. Remember, the US is trying to DESTROY the middle class in order to create a cheap labor pool in order to compete with China.
And don't worry. China's camps of political dissident slave labor will be equaled in the US. There's just the issue of deciding who, aside from the Muslims, to lock up in the forced labor camper.
Long live President Bush!
Death to the 22nd Amendment!
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
As for why he did not directly say the above things, many say it is so that an element of faith is kept intact, however that seems a weak reason. It seems more likely to me that, due to the constant eyes of the religious leaders of the time being on him, any direct claim of the above statements could spur them into action to persecute him earlier than they actually did. Jesus' ministry caused a very unstable political environment, and in such a situation one must keep careful guard over what they say or else their words may be turned against them.
However, he definitely made no claim or implication that he was not God or God's son. This is a theory developed by those who attempt to work around evidence of Jesus' existence by saying he existed as a moral man, but we misinterpreted what he was saying. the evidence for this idea is sparse and shaky, though.
I hope this answers your question, or at leasts clears some confusion.
I find that although many people are liberal in beliefs, they are conservative in actions.
It was pretty much just decided by a series of councils between the fourth and ninth century. You're not really going to get an "explanation", exactly, at least not one that's guaranteed to satisfy you. It pretty much just comes down to, 1500ish years ago some people had an argument over whether Jesus = God's human son or Jesus = God, and the Jesus = God side won the argument. End of discussion.
A lack of government research should actually open up doors for private research.
So what happens when the private research results in patents that are too broad for the public good?
### Watches do not procreate and change to suit their environment.
A living thing doesn't change to suit their environment either, the changes are completly random, independed of the environment. The point of evolution is that those creatures with random changes that turn out to benefit to the living thing get to reproduce, while those that aren't die out.
Back to the watch: build a 100 watches which varry in some details, smash them, those that don't break into a thousand pieces on hit you reproduce again with random changes and go smashing them again, repeat that a lot and you get a watch pretty good at tacking hammer hits without much throuble.
I disagree. Natural resources are merely mismanaged and management is essentially a problem of thought. If we are having problems with scarce resources, such as oil or fish, then it is the domain of the mind to find alternatives. Overfishing is a shortsighted abuse of a natural (replenishable)resource. Perhaps as food technology advances, diets will rely heavier on vegetables like the soya bean. Produce yields can improve. As oil is an irreplaceable resource, we must use our collective knowledge to refine acceptable alternatives such as solar power or biodiesel.
The more pervasive information and communication become, the more empowered global citizens will be. Social networking will power this revolution.
-lavaface
harmonious design
"And all 6 billion people in the world cannot be thought workers."
Why not?
Because a large percentage of them are stupid. Take you, for example.
If you mean the century in which some minds cut their umbilical cord to biology, then you could well be right.
But if you expect that will provide an end game for things biological then you need to remember that despite all the progress of multi-cellular eukaryotes, the prokaryotes continue to be the underlying drivers.
And even if we do manage to bring some planetary-scale biological disaster to ourselves and much of the rest of the biosphere, whatever biology is left will soon enough adapt to vacant niches.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
"get the fuck off this site. I'm sick of you religious idiots"
Even if we're geeks? Thats not fair.
I can't say I'm terribly surprised by the negative response to the parent's question, but I do know that such knee-jerk responses are an automatic admission that the previous posters have decided that they will be not be thought workers of the future. Oh well . . .
harmonious design
For one thing, we can see clear signs of human adaptation. People in warm, sunny climates have darker skin than those living in colder climates. Humans living at high altitudes have expnaded lung capacity. People living in extremely cold climates have smaller bodies with shorter limbs than those living in warm climates. We see small changes on those levels all the time.
Creationists do not dispute the existence of microevolution. In the mainstream reconciliation of biblical history with modern science, God created genes to allow creatures to survive in all sorts of environments. Sin caused thermodynamics, which in turn caused mutations that disabled specific genes. Natural selection then caused individuals that lost those genes to thrive in niches where loss of those genes would be an advantage. For instance, Adam and Eve had several competing genes for stimulating and inhibiting production of melanin. Descendants in Africa lost melanin-inhibiting genes, while descendants in more polar climates lost melanin-stimulating genes. They dispute the validity of radioisotope dating and that E. coli and H. sapiens had a common ancestor.
I've yet to see a flower or a star with the words "God wuz here" writen on it.
That's because you skipped all the mushrooms. Haven't you played Super Mario? :-)
There is no evidence of God.
Other than that the prophecies of the Bible are falsifiable but have in fact held up? For instance, rchaeologists once believed Jericho and Nineveh were myths until they unearthed the cities' ruins. Psalm 22 contains a graphic depiction of a crucifixion, a method of execution that would not be practiced until centuries later when the Romans invented it.
Seek and ye shall find, gentlemen.
For this to become a reality requires some fundamental changes in human nature, and also in what is recognized and rewarded. If there is a method developed for the recognition and monetary reward of people who make contributions to the fast advancement of human knowledge and the resulting benefits, using the collaborative model, including corporations, then the process outlined in the article might be in our future.
Currently the model is not collaborate and cooperate, but compete, compete, compete. Publish, patent and copyright, and all the other impediments to the articles vision. Scientists today only get recognized, by government grants, and by their peers, if they work in secrecy and publish as individuals. An entirely different model than outlined in the article.
Now the Open Source software development, has a model similar to that outlined in the article, but they still need to work out the recognition and reward model, that will promote and sustain the collaborative environment. It is no different than kindergarten, for adults and corporations, it is about the behaviours that get recognized and rewarded or penalized. MS still has not figured what behaviours will be rewarded and what behaviours will be penalized, because they still believe that it is they, and not the officially elected bodies that make the rules. They spout about communism on the one hand, without really knowing what democracy is, but they don't talk about Fascism, Hitler and the concept of world domination, because that is just too close to home.
You know, we really should have Slashdot moderations in Yiddish... That'd give people something to blame Jews for.
The real breakthrough will come when we have an AI capable of parsing and analyzing political and advertising material for validity. Then we will end up with something like this for most of them:
[Premise] (false)
[Premise] (false)
[Fallacious argument] (bad premises)
[Fallacious argument] (ad hominem)
[Fallacious argument] (ad hominem)
[Fallacious argument] (sweeping generalization)
[Fallacious argument] (circular argument)
[Fallacious argument] (strawman)
[Fallacious argument] (ad populum)
[Fallacious argument] (appeal to authority)
[Fallacious argument] (anecdotal evidence)
Truth content: none
Best troll this month!
wikis are a disaster
truth is subsumed under overlayed falsehood; politics determines content; honest contribution is discouraged
there is a better way
I read to the reference of wolfram and stopped. Sure, wolfram is a smart guy, mathematica is pretty cool. His book is totally conceited and most of its content is unoriginal, without reference to the true creators. In no way did he invent CAs, or as far as i know really contribute much to the field. Conway's game of life was the first CA, I believe. Way before wolrram's time. Anyone that gives this guy much credit for these things immediatly loses large portions of any respect I have for them.
Besides the fact that Wired is now only a "gadget guy" rag dedicated to rich kid libertarians, I've heard a very similar prediction before. I can't remember if it was Kurzweil or Negroponte, or someone else, but I remember in the last century hearing, "The last 10 years of the 20th century will see more progress than the combined history of man". I thought that was a stupid idea then, and I find this new quote no less stupid. Pundits are overrated. Especially when Wired magazine is paying attention to them. Wired got screwed sometime early on. The magazine was originally dedicated to the social implications of technology for everyone. Whether it was some cool new technology to help the poor folks in the African desert harness water cheaply and efficiently from the air, or a low cost power management solution for middle class homes in the United States to beat the energy crunch. Now it's all toys for rich boys and pretty much just gadgets. There is no longer any kind of social responsibilty to that publication at all. What the hell happened to it? It used to be the neo-hippy magazine of the 90s. It was the new Whole Earth Review. Now it may as well be a catalog from Bang & Olufsen.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The article wasn't a very good one; it did cover a topic not often covered - scientific method itself - but it didn't really say anything that wouldn't be fairly obvious to anyone who half way understands what he was talking about. It is obvious that current systems and practices will get better and more universal (his so called hyperdata where more powerful systems simply can correlate more data). What is not obvious is that the next 50 years will be one glorious boom of improvement. Although the world has managed to avoid a nuclear war in the last 50 years, there is no saying that there will not be one in the next 50 years, say between China and the US over Taiwan. Yugoslavia showed that it doesn't take much to turn neighbours into mass murderers.
A big economic meltdown could do it too. Or a major bird flu epidemic. Or plain simple glabl warming with major storms, flooding, and droughts. The challenges haven't gotten smaller.
He didn't mention the dark ages, where there wasn't much in the way of development for over 500 years from 500AD onwards after the fall of Rome. It could happen again.
“The trouble is, the evidence does not back up this litany. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so since the Club of Rome published ‘The Limits to Growth’ in 1972. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world’s population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving.”
--
The story of wheat
Ears of plenty
Dec 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition
The story of man’s staple food
[Image] (Still Pictures)
IN 10,000 years, the earth’s population has doubled ten times, from less than 10m to more than six billion now and ten billion soon. Most of the calories that made that increase possible have come from three plants: maize, rice and wheat. The oldest, most widespread and until recently biggest of the three crops is wheat (see chart). To a first approximation wheat is the staple food of mankind, and its history is that of humanity.
Yet today, wheat is losing its crown. The tonnage (though not the acreage) of maize harvested in the world began consistently to exceed that of wheat for the first time in 1998; rice followed suit in 1999. Genetic modification, which has transformed maize, rice and soyabeans, has largely passed wheat by--to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming an “orphan crop”. The Atkins diet and a fashion for gluten allergies have made wheat seem less wholesome. And with population growth rates falling sharply while yields continue to rise, even the acreage devoted to wheat may now begin to decline for the first time since the stone age.
It is time to pay tribute to this strange little grass that has done so much for the human race. Strange is the word, for wheat is a genetic monster. A typical wheat variety is hexaploid--it has six copies of each gene, where most creatures have two. Its 21 chromosomes contain a massive 16 billion base pairs of DNA, 40 times as much as rice, six times as much as maize and five times as much as people. It is derived from three wild ancestral species in two separate mergers. The first took place in the Levant 10,000 years ago, the second near the Caspian Sea 2,000 years later. The result was a plant with extra-large seeds incapable of dispersal in the wild, dependent entirely on people to sow them.
The story actually starts much earlier, around 12,000 years ago. At the time, after several warm millennia, a melting ice sheet in North America collapsed and a gigantic lake drained into the North Atlantic through the St Lawrence seaway. The torrent of cool, fresh water altered the climate so drastically that the ice age, which had been in full retreat, resumed for a further 11 centuries. The Scandinavian ice sheet surged south. Western Asia became not only cooler, but much drier. The Black Sea all but dried out.
People in what is now Syria had been subsisting happily on a diet of acorns, gazelles and grass seeds. The centuries of drought drove them to depend increasingly on wild grass seeds. Abruptly, soon after 11,000 years ago, they began to cultivate rye and chickpeas, then einkorn and emmer, two ancestors of wheat, and later barley. Soon cultivated grain was their staple food. It happened first in the Karacadag Mountains in south-eastern Turkey--it is only here that wild einkorn grass contains the identical genetic fingerprint of modern domesticated wheat.
Who first replanted the seeds and why? For a start, he was probably a she: women have primary responsibilities for plant gathering in hunter-gatherer societies. The time was certainly ripe for agriculture: the ability to make tools and control fire (cooking makes many plants more digestible) was already well established. But was it an act of inspiration or desperation? Did it perhaps happen by accident, as discarded grains germinated around human settlements?
The extreme centre is the paper's historical position. --Geoffrey Crowther
Kelly's _Wired_ has spent over a decade spewing little but science fiction. Therefore he's an expert in the future of science. It's the geek _OMNI_, and he's the geek Guccione.
--
make install -not war
The first operating principle of all society is self-defense. The second operating principle is food production for the population - a starving population cannot be productive. Only the surplus after food production is available for economic investment. The Third operating principle of all society is property rights management - recording deeds and such. All of this work requires energy. Currently, our food production is dependent on petroleum based fertilizer. Food transportation is also dependent on petroleum. This energy source is dwindling.
A few points:
a) Food costs have increased faster than CPI core inflation.
b) Housing and property rates have increased far faster than CPI core inflation.
c) Energy costs are increasing dramatically faster than CPI core inflation.
d) Value added manufactured goods are dropping in price drastically due to automation improvements in production.
e) Communication networks allow for labor arbitrage across national borders in information technology centric businesses.
-----
All this adds up to not cheaper basic necessities, but cheaper value added manufactured goods due to less energy intensive automation. Basic necessities, however, should continue to rise as long as energy rates rise. Also transporting food and manufactured goods should increase the cost of goods due to higher energy rates. Information technology and cheap communications should be resistant to high energy rates though due to the marginal cost of energy in proportion to the productivity.
Unless we find a new source of cheap energy to harness, I suspect the next fifty to one hundred years will be quite tough for the vast majority of the population. Not a rosy scenario.
Because thought alone cannot create food, fix my plumbing, and hook up my new broadband connection.
Yes I'm sure some of these tasks will be solvable with robotics / AI *eventually*. But just look at how hard it is to automate driving.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
For instance, rchaeologists once believed Jericho and Nineveh were myths until they unearthed the cities' ruins.
This is not a "prophesy". The bible is a historical document; the presence of some factual information within the book does not establish truth of the entire text. "Falsifiable prediction" is a quality sought in scientific theories, which are rigorously defined models of natural law. It is not a trait which is considered important in texts or documents, nor is it one used by historians.
The Iliad is a famous epic greek poem which tells two simultaneous stories: An account of a war between the nations of Troy and Mycenae; and the struggle between the Greek Gods Hera and Zeus as they personally interfere in the events of that war. The city of Troy was long believed by archaeologists to be a myth; however, recent excavations are believed to be the ruins of that very city. Does this prove the existence of the Greek Gods?
Psalm 22 contains a graphic depiction of a crucifixion, a method of execution that would not be practiced until centuries later when the Romans invented it.
In my response here I will not bother to read Psalm 22 myself, and will simply assume your depiction of its contents are accurate.
The following is from Wikipedia.
While some or all of the Psalms are older works passed through oral tradition, the Psalms were not recorded in written form until the 6th century BCE-- after the earliest evidence of crucifiction listed by Wikipedia.
Even if we are to assume psalm 22 significantly predates the seventh century in composition, between your statement and wikipedia's, it would appear that the bible has apparent references to crucifiction in at least two places. The most reasonable conclusion to draw here would simply be that the jewish community of the time had experience or knowledge of crucifictions from some local context, and so wrote about it. This would be in no way surprising, nor would it be surprising if crucifiction was independently invented (many centuries before its use sprang up in Greece and Rome) and then forgotten; the idea of killing someone by nailing them to a board is not a particularly creative one. There is no good reason to jump to the conclusion that descriptions of a simple execution method are meant to describe something that has never happened before and will only happen in the future.
You received an unfair flamebait moderation. There was no flaming in your post. Shame on the mod who did that.
Please don't read this and think it is in anyway representative of science or scientific method. The only value of this article is a demonstration of the current devaluation of science. Not only does someone with no college degree feel able to comment, in a moronic way, about the current status and future of science, but people take notice of his addled opinions.
There is a deadly mixture of the meaningless "Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science...", the statement of the obvious, "Technology is, in its essence, new ways of thinking", the silly "We retain reptilian reflexes deep in our minds (fight or flight)" and the irrelevant "Information is growing by 66% per year while physical production grows by only 7% per year".
Just like humans and E. coli share common ancestors.
You've met my inlaws?
Nah... That's not it. According to this article the United States and Japan contributed a larger percentage of their GDP to science and technology research in 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4697883
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I wonder how long until we break the record of 972. This was in 1992. http://www.improb.com/ig/1993/1993-lit.html
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
But I have to admit the vast self-promotional preambles attached to much of the otherwise often interesting stuff Edge puts out can be off-putting. I'm used to them and still needed a double take before I spotted the change of context. It just didn't sound like something Kelly would throw in, even if Brand's observation was perfectly relevant.
However, you and others really should try to get over your obsession with Wolfram's supposed lack of citations. Yes it does seem he missed a bit of what was going on in parallel during the decade plus he was buried in his own research, but the end product was a book, not an academic paper, and its copious notes do provide valuable coverage of the history prior to the early '90s.
Wolfram's earlier systematic research on the classification of one dimensional cellular automata was seminal to the field, turning it from something only seen as fit for mathematical recreations columns in the early '80s to one of the pillars of the rise of complex systems research in the late '80s. (I was an interested participant in both phases.)
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Because some of them are posting on Slashdot.
We already do such experiments on a large scale like the Nurses Health Study and others. They're called "Retrospective Analyses," and they can be a good first step but can ultimately give some BAD and very wrong results. The Nurses Health Study followed on the order of 10's of thousands of nurses over decades, and one of the "results" of the study was that taking estrogen replacement was correlated with decreased cardiovascular disease (i.e heart attacks). Unfortunately, what the study actually showed was that intrinsically HEALTHIER nurses took estrogen and, surprise, surprise, had less heart disease. It was only after going back and doing a real experiment (double-blind, placebo controlled) that it was revealed that estrogen is actually BAD (i.e. can increase cardiovascular risk). I don't care how smart your supercomputer is, you're still going to have trouble with confounding variables in this type of analysis...
The only problem with that is that IT isn't a basic science where we do research, it's a technology. He says bio will be the next big thing, because we know so little about it... We are on the verge of a breakthrough that could shift our whole view of the universe in biology, whereas in IT we will definately advance and we will create new technologies, but it is hard to imagine how someone will discover something of huge signifigance, like DNA, in IT.
Charles
It is by no means impossible for thoughtful people to predict the future with impressive accuracy. As evidence, here are some challenges for America that scientists and diplomats foresaw in 1955, from the book The Fabulous Future: America in 1980:
I think your response shows the deceptiveness and self-centered greed that characterizes special interests. What you call 'reduced funding' is actually increased funding at a lower rate of growth. What you neglect to tell readers is the NIH budget has had several years of sustained growth under this administration. In an era were federal spending is out of control I would have hoped that growth in the NIH budget could be restrained more. My guess is that the damage being done is similarly illusory.
an ill wind that blows no good
and then stalls, I hardly think there is any reason to panic. In any case, private R&D dwarfs federal R&D.
NIH needs to get its act together, anyway, and fix the major problems with PhD overproduction it has caused. NIH's primary method of spending money is to give it to university professors, who use it to reproduce. We now have far more PhD's, especially in biosciences, than the system has room for. NIH needs to shift from funding grad students and post-docs to funding full-time salaried permanent positions in federal labs.
Actually, it is worse than this. We also have a massive shortage of K12 science teachers. Why? Because the state governments underpay these positions. If you graduate with a degree in science, and grad school is subsidized while K12 teaching is paid far below market rates, which do you choose? It should not be a surprise that we have wound up with a glut of underemployed PhDs and no one to teach our children.
Interstingly, the same points that you use to argue against biology are the same reasons I could see it becoming the 'next big thing' (tm). The power of IT and the internet in general have been (and still are) basic driving forces between researchers for the last 10 years. Biotech (by definition) neccesitates the use of IT - bioinformatics, online databases and collaborations through email, websites and BBSs are currently used, and will be increasingly used in years to come. And in terms of social change, etc., science has proven itself as an impetus for such change to occur. Innovation in farming methods and health sciences in the last 50 years alone have had tremendous impact in socioeconomic situations of many developing countries, and hopefully will extrapolate to low-cost solutions for less fortunate countries as well.
Ban Engadget - moderators censor comments!
All the scientists I've met are paranoid about other people stealing their big idea, and there seems to be a retarded mentality that they have to be the sole innovator. When IT people got over their egos (for the most part) and really started to collaborate on the web, life as a programmer got a lot more interesting. I don't know if scientists are creative enough to pull this off, and there may not be enough dollars to go around anyway.
My only regret... is that I have... bonitis..
The combination of your complete ignorance with the arrogance of the way you state your beliefs as fact defies comprehension.
I simultaneously feel sad for your state while also frustrated that people like you are allowed to persist for so long in life without someone putting in the effort to educate you. It's sad state when someone who can read and write and converse was not first taught how to think and observe, but instead parrot absurd stories from centuries ago motivated to control others and instill fear. (and no, that is not flamebait - this is what most religious stories really do to drive their adoption).
Many people talk of "religous tolerance"... that somehow we are supposed to be tolerant of these views. Tolerant of people who clearly state as fact beliefs that are not accurate and do not coincide with observation. To me the statements above in the parent post are simply lies. This is open deception and tolerance of this behavior enables and promotes the deception of others. *sigh*
wait wait -- it may be, but it wasn't MEANT as a troll...
seriously, why do you think it was a troll?
Informatics is the word I would use to describe the scholarly pursuit of how we manage information. Virologist, Physicist, Chemist, Mathematician, Informatician ( <-- I'm one of these)
Interestingly, the (largeish, international) team I'm working with have a password-protected web forum (an off-the-shelf one) which already does all that stuff. It's great for semi-informal things and preliminary results, rather like a conference, but it's not for general scientific consumption for a number of reasons, e.g. lack of peer review, not static, not easily archived, informal, crap formatting next to LaTeX (when the hell does MathML get here?)...
But it's good since we all have access to the same data, are all experts in the specific field we're working on and so can verify other people's claims quickly and easily, which obviates some of the requirements of publishing.
No one's published any papers yet though, and I do wonder if it'll cause any cat fights if someone gets left off an author list after posting something relevant on the forum.
thomas kuhn: the study of the scientific method in 1962..... that is pretty funny (and so wildly wrong)..... started long, long before then and Kuhn's ideas tend to be much more prominent the further away from the philosophy of science one goes....
Link here: Speculations on the Future of Science - it's a movable type blog, so moderated comments welcome...
Energy: time to change the picture.
I remember Wired magazine in the 90's
The New Economy would change everything, old industrial dino's would die and All Good Would Come Upon Man (trademark). The whole world would be Happy Happy Joy Joy Joy because of the new god called Internet...
Every month this was published in a magazine so beautifully designed, your eyes would hurt.
If this man can not predict the future over 5 years, why should we believe he can over 50??
Off your meds again, eh?
I disagree with most of your premise but it was the last line that really got me:
"Spending 30 minutes looking at Myspace will give you an indication of the amount of energy the NEXT generation will be willing to put into connecting online."
I can't look at Myspace for more than 30 seconds without requiring the use of a cyanide capsule. To imagine a world where Myspace morons run things is enough to make one contemplate building an isolated shack in rural Montana!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Um, because at some point, SOMEONE has to make the houses, grow the food, mine the metal, assembal the computer. Not to mention the people who sell the above to other people.
No... A paper with one author, and a thousand people trying to crap it up with gay jokes and goatse pics.
yes -- fine. I was not using the scientific definition monkey, but rather the colloquial, or slang version referring to somone who makes mistakes and is mocked or teased, you know, acting like a 'monkey'?
A struggle in many ways of the copyleft versus the copyright, for the copy left the pursuit of scientific results being the goal with less infests on who controls patents and copyright, which of course disrupts collaborative sharing and slows the process.
So it does require public and philanthropic funding to succeed to the greatest degree possible. So the decision is whether to focus on getting results for the benefit of the majority or as currently is the case to focus on getting profits for the minority (who oddly enough suffer along with the majority as a result of the delays in new developments in medical science).
On for those that parrot the lie that greed is the only effective motivator, patents et al. were suspended during both world wars in order to prevent their delaying the development of new technologies and to promote collaborative sharing for the best results (after the wars things went back to normal, blind greed promoted the lie the patents promote scientific development).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
When did having multiple variables become demographics and not science? If you have a large enough sample size, you can choose your subjects with some variables for control. And why does this mean that there cannot be a separate control group?
Perhaps you do not know of mathematics now that can handle the number of variables and indicate their relative statistical significance. But given the data, I'm sure that mathematicians will rise to the challenge.
Yes. And so what? Such storage could be totally under your own control, to be released on death perhaps, if you so choose.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
"All these increases are just going to employ a new crop of N faculty, who are going to spin off another unemployable 10*N grad students and postdocs. That is the problem that needs to be fixed, and the increases just push the problem out a little further."
Uhm...who told you that people who get NIH funding are unemployable? The NIH funds biomedical research. Biomedical technology is one of the hottest areas of growth in the US economy, aside from "Wal-Mart associate," and "McDonald's Fry Technician."
I mean, really. Use your brain. Basic economics tells you that people won't pursue degrees that take 8+ years to complete, if those degrees don't get them jobs. To say otherwise is to ignore the fundamental realities of free market capitalism that neo-conservatives use to justify everything in their twisted, dogmatic worldview.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Technically tomate'o tomahto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catarrhini
Im not even Christian, but i seem to remember from my senior a statistic that apparently Catholicism and the majority of Christian denominations support evolution, but their followers either dont realise their religion does, or dont approve of it.
There will come a day where people stop argueing about whether or not jesus, noah and adam/eve existed, and start listening to the values in the Bible.
Im agnostic, and stuff like love, charity and forgiveness sound fine by me.
What doesnt sound fine by me is people with blind faith. They're the ones who hold back progress. Perhaps they are scared that science will make the world less "godly". I would lik to say, the more you know, the more wonderful the universe becomes.
Monkeys are much like humans in many ways. A million idiots at a million computers will result in nothing more than a headache of Biblical proportions for the IT guys. No matter how much time and freedom from responsibility you give them, many people just won't do anything intellectually productive. That, my friend, is why humanity will never become one giant thinktank.
And I quote Futurama:
"High Priest: "Great wall of prophecy! Reveal to us god's will that we may blindly obey."
Crowd: "Free us from thought and responsibility."
High Priest: "We shall read things off you!"
Crowd: "And do them."
High Priest: "Your words guide us."
Crowd: "We're dumb."
What's more realistic?
Some magical creature created the universe out of nothing and wants us to follow its intructions, but refuses to give any evidence of its existance.
Or
You're a delusional brainwashed individual.
I'll give you some help. The next list consists of made up characters. They do not exist, but people love to make their children believe in them.
* Santaclaus
* Fairies
* The Boogyman
* God
* The monster under the bed
* The toothfairy
* Dwarfs
* Witches
* Vampires (excluding the bat species with the same name)
* Ghosts
* The members of the QA team of any TV channel
I know it's tough, but part of growing up involves growing out of these juvenile fantasies. Don't worry, you'll get over it.
> Can humans breed with apes?
Begging the question a bit, aren't we? The answer is 'yes, provided the apes in question are other humans'. Of course we can't breed with other apes if those apes are of different species.
If 'apes' is a broad enough definition to include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, then it has to include us too. Otherwise we could equally say 'Can chimps breed with apes?' And since they certainly can't interbreed with gorillas or orangutans, the answer would be no...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
People always think of oil being only to power their cars. But by far more important is oil as an essential component of drugs and materials like plastic.
I find it inconceivable that we are burning this unbelievably important resource. What will we do when we wake up one day and we can't drive anywhere, we can't shrink-wrap our groceries and we can't even take a paracetamol to relieve the headache we've caused ourselves?
By that point I think there'll be a tasty patent-pending for retrieving long-chain-hydrocarbons from landfill sites. But we're still gunna be screwed if we run out of oil early because we burnt it all.
Your ignorance is fucking hilarious. Me and all my work-colleagues haven't laughed so much in weeks.
ps Comparing the pieces of a watch to the components of cells is a false analogy.
pps Claiming breaking up a watch and having it spontaneously recreate itself is akin to evolution or a chemical formation of life is also an amazingly ignorant and false analogy.
ppps I admire the fact you didn't post anonymously, but you should really actually try to understand the current thinking of evolutionary scientists before you attempt to discredit them.
pppps Unlike you religious fruitcakes, evolutionary scientists don't all agree with each other, and welcome criticism of their theories. You could probably learn something from them.
Well said.
Typical of people wanting to flamebait you away. I think its because the truth hurts.
What would you rather have federal funding spent on?
Provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of libery...
If we are going to be "taxed" at the rates that the Bush administration seems to feel are acceptable, would you not rather have the money go to science funding rather than subsidizing companies like Halliburton?
More horrible deception! You present a false choice again. Haliburton or liberal altruism? I reject both. I would prefer if the money went to pay down the national debt.
Well, our lab has been doing OK, but the 20% cut that many NIH funded labs have endured this year has meant the loss of a significant number of highly skilled jobs that return money in tax revenues. I personally know eleven jobs that have been eliminated as a result of these cuts and beyond that, there are a significant number of positions that could not be filled to begin with.
The brazenness of you ivory tower propeller heads never ceases to amaze. Federally funded jobs do not net anything in taxes. They consume them. I am amazed you suggest otherwise. Reduce those jobs to a minimum and you lower the tax burden of working people, so they can afford to educate their children. As for the jobs that are eliminated, biotechnology is a growing field. Your coworkers job prospects in the private sector are bright. Thanks President Bush!
an ill wind that blows no good
Before 1940, if you wanted to become a top scientist you did graduate worked or post-doc'ed in Europe. The huge war effort and socialization of higher education (VA, NSF) converted the US into the scientific powerhouse.
I dont see any one country now monopolizing science like the US did in the second half of the 20th century. There seems to be a number of powerhouses, including significant bases in CHina, INdia and JApan.
In Soviet Russia, research does YOU!
> 2000 BC -- First text indexes
> 200 BC -- Cataloged library (at Alexandria)
> 1000 AD -- Collaborative encyclopedia
> 1590 -- Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon)
> 1600 -- Laboratory
> 1609 -- Telescopes and microscopes
> 1650 -- Society of experts
> 1665 -- Repeatability (Robert Boyle)
> 1665 -- Scholarly journals
> 1675 -- Peer review
> 1687 -- Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton)
> 1920 -- Falsifiability (Karl Popper)
> 1926 -- Randomized design (Ronald Fisher)
> 1937 -- Controlled placebo
> 1946 -- Computer simulation
> 1950 -- Double blind experiment
> 1962 -- Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn)
>
> Projecting forward, Kelly had five things to say about the next 100 years in
> science...
>
> 1) There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the
> last 400 years.
All the advancements he lists are in one small area. It is believable that in the field of indexing information, there will be more advancements in the next 50 years than there were in the last 400. But...Indexing information is not all that science is. We will NOT have more scientific advancements in the next 50 years than we had in the last 400! We WILL change the way we live by advancements in a few small areas.
For example, all nuclear power plants use steam turbines (fancy, high-RPM steam engines.) These same turbines are used for thermal-solar power generation. How much advancement does he think will occur in the field of steam engines? During the early 1800's the world adopted rail roads...and the amount of rail road track doubled every year for several decades. This led to the people being able to travel to a range of destinations that were increasing by orders of magnitude. It was an imporant step, but did not sum up an entire civilization. Medicine still had something to say about how well people lived. (Though steam locomotives brought vaccines and antibiotics to towns that would have never had them otherwise.) My point is: not even railroads changed the entire civilization. They did change the way people traveled.
How many advancements will be made in the field of electricity? We have DC, AC, and 3-phase power. How far will we push these basic principles? During the 1800's the world changed - based on the work of a few gneiuses. We are not making massive breakthroughs on the scale of Tesla's alternating current on a daily basis, but we are doing with our computers the same thing he did with his AC power.
Finally, one thing that might actually cause massive increases in scientific knowledge will be the rising crop of hundreds of millions of technical people in countries such as India and China. Every tinkerer who can publish his/her results, and who reads the publications in his/her field adds to the base of knowledge. (Side Node: We need to return the USA to a technically led society, instead of one led by accountants.)
Andy Out!
Because a significant percentage wouldn't want to be even if they had the chance.
(Oh, and the small matter of there being far too much manual labour that current robotics tech simply isn't up to - ie almost all of it)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"'And all 6 billion people in the world cannot be thought workers.'"
"Why not?"
For the same reason that two people cannot get rich pressing each other's pants.
I'm not worried about us wiping most of ourselves out. It's the future we have if we survive that scares me more. I'm not sure we can ever do anything but spiral towards a fixed point of synthetic hell -- Mailer's plastic (d)evil. Industrial capitalism simply accelerates us to it. The problem with every moment of the past is that it brought us closer to this: At some point we began with Nature. One can disagree about the early history of the divergence.
The most bleak thought I have is that our externalities -- our systems -- are organic reflections of our psyche. But perhaps it is bleaker yet to realise that survival requires acceptance of it. Dave Pollard sometimes puts me instantly in this frame of mind, like a hypnotist. I still think he's much smarter than me put together.
you had me at #!