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."

Comments

Wikiscience: see this post

[bj8rn]

Re: Change will occur much more rapidly than that

[Black Parrot]

> If you see Moorse's law as applied to electronics

Moorse's law: the number of people who know Moorse code is halving every decade.

Re:Wikiscience

[lennier]

Can you imagine a natural selection paper written by the masses?

Because of course something as irreducibly complex as Darwinian theory could never arise from the competitive random chance interactions of a normally-distributed population.