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

NIH funding

[BWJones]

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.

Tough to predict

[evil agent]

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.

Re:Tough to predict

[Baseball_Fan]

You don't think there's been much progress in the past hundred years?

Not really, there has not been that much progress. Life is pretty much the same, except we have different toys to occupy our time.

hell, in this generation alone we have had the birth of the Internet, email, and the WWW.

So what? It is a system of communication, it is not communication. People have been communicating since the beginning of time. What difference does it make if I talk to you face to face, or send you an IM? Maybe you don't have the time to come over and speak face to face, but could that also imply that if someone is unwilling to expend that energy on a communication then the value of the communication is lowered? Could the great WWW be a bad thing, increasing useless information?

You don't think there's been much progress in the past hundred years?

Lets look at history. How did the people live in the 1900's? 1800's? 1700's?. If you were to ask a person who was alive in 1900 how much more advanced he was to those of the 1800's, his eyes would light up and he would start with "we can farm much better, we can grow more crop." But in reality, all narcisism aside, aren't they pretty much the same? Same manner of birth, same clothing, same need for food and love, same in almost every way. Then you could ask the guy from the 1800's how he is better than the one from the 1700's, and you might get the same reply as the one from the 1900's talking about him!

When we skim away the distractions, what changed? We might change the way we send a letter, send an e-mail, but fundamentally we are still just talking. We might have went from walking, to horse riding, to horse carrige, to steam engine car, to gasoline engine car, but how is that an advancement that a car might travel at 60 mph versus a horse at 20 mph. Is it an earth shattering event?? Or is it a minor improvement over past conditions?

Here is one more example. Before there was the internet, there were bars in the wild west where people played card games like poker. They would sit around a table and drink and gamble. Today we have the internet, and people sit in their living room playing poker, and in some instances gambling.

Has life really changed all that much?

Change will occur much more rapidly than that

[eyefish]

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.

I don't believe he knows ANYTHING about science.

[khasim]

From TFA:

While ordinary life continues for the subjects, massive amounts of constant data about their lifestyles are drawn and archived. Out of this huge database, specific controls, measurements and variables can be "isolated" afterwards. For instance, the vital signs and lifestyle metrics of a hundred thousand people might be recorded in dozens of different ways for 20-years, and then later analysis could find certain variables (smoking habits, heart conditions) and certain ways of measuring that would permit the entire 20 years to be viewed as an experiment - one that no one knew was even going on at the time.

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 ... and they can match that to your hospital records ... but how will they know anything about your illegal drug usage? Yes, that would be a factor.

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".

Re:It will all return to religion

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't take this the wrong way, but you are a close-minded simpleton.

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.

Re:It will all return to religion

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: The last century of biology?

[ynotds]

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.

Re:Wikiscience: see this post

[koreaman]

All encyclopedias (encyclopediae?), whether they be Brittanica, Wikipedia, or whatnot, are less accurate than real scientific journals.