[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A Richard Feynman quote. This is from The Character of Physical Law, 1965, chapter one: the law of gravitation, page 15. “This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature– this idea that to look at the thing, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.”
Rick Rosner: Okay. Humans have been around for 100,000 years and some characterizations; it depends on where you draw the line between humans and proto-humans but many tens of thousands of years. Progress really took off along with the scientific method; observe, experiment, and try to come up with a theory that accounts for what you’ve observed. Ideally, it’s a mathematical characterization. So, it took us a long time to come up with a scientific method but it is what has delivered the most powerful results in the history of humanity.
Now, once we move into the AI aided Big Data era of technology, science, and civilization there may be more powerful modifications or additions to the scientific method. We’ve plucked all the easy observations to be made and with the more esoteric observations, which could deliver results just as powerful as some of the easy observations plus theory, it may be that the methodology isn’t exactly what we think of as scientific method. For instance, there’s the brute force method of testing substances that might have efficacy against one disease or another and thanks to robot aided lab experimentation, you just go ahead and you test every possible substance you can get a hold of to see what it does to your virus or your bacterium or whatever you’re trying to fix. With no subtlety whatsoever you just test thousands of things and see what comes up which is still scientific but isn’t what somebody in the 1930s would have thought of as a scientific method which is you think about what’s going on with this disease and you can’t do brute force at that point and you think about what stuff might work against this stuff and you just test generally the things that seem to you the human is more promising.
I’m sure that there will be lots of changes in methodology. The scientific method will be expanded to include Big Data brute force methodology where you don’t have to pay robots, so long hours are cheap, lots of testing and thinking through all sorts of ridiculous hypotheses becomes cheap because information processing becomes cheap and science changes.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 