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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.
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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.
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".
Why not?
Rethinking email
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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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.
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".
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...