Daily Archives: March 29, 2006

Science: the next 100 years

Posted on by

EDGE: SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE By Kevin Kelly:

“in 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.
2) This will be a century of biology. It is the domain with the most scientists, the most new results, the most economic value, the most ethical importance, and the most to learn.
3) Computers will keep leading to new ways of science. Information is growing by 66% per year while physical production grows by only 7% per year. The data volume is growing to such levels of ‘zillionics’ that we can expect science to compile vast combinatorial libraries, to run combinatorial sweeps through possibility space (as Stephen Wolfram has done with cellular automata), and to run multiple competing hypotheses in a matrix. Deep realtime simulations and hypothesis search will drive data collection in the real world.
4) New ways of knowing will emerge. ‘Wikiscience’ is leading to perpetually refined papers with a thousand authors. Distributed instrumentation and experiment, thanks to miniscule transaction cost, will yield smart-mob, hive-mind science operating ‘fast, cheap, & out of control.’ Negative results will have positive value (there is already a ‘Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine’). 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.
5) Science will create new levels of meaning. The Internet already is made of one quintillion transistors, a trillion links, a million emails per second, 20 exabytes of memory. It is approaching the level of the human brain and is doubling every year, while the brain is not. It is all becoming effectively one machine. And we are the machine.”

…Our moral obligation is to generate possibilities, to discover the infinite ways, however complex and high-dimension, to play the infinite game. It will take all possible species of intelligence in order for the universe to understand itself. Science, in this way, is holy. It is a divine trip.”

…it makes one wonder, right?

GMU – Daring to be different

Posted on by
I really don’t care much about sports.  But as it turns out, my school–George Mason University–just made it to the final four on the NCAA.  That brings more attention to my rather medium-sized university than the two Nobel laureates in its economics faculty.  One good thing is that GMU graduates get to benefit from such positive externalities regardless of their academic or sports origin. 
As time goes by and I meet differnet sorts of scholars, I get to value what I learned in GMU more and more–so yes, I am happy too.  My former teachers are excited and wrote this little sidebar on why GMU succeeds in academia as well:
 
 
At GMU we practice Entrepeneurial Economics and we still think there are unexploited profits and oddball geniuses to be found. You can’t get much stranger or more brilliant than Robin Hanson, one of the architects of the Defense Department’s short-lived “terror futures market.” Betting markets are now used to forecast elections and they are starting to gain a foothold in the corporate world. Hanson wants to go further and have policies decided by contests in betting markets. (He calls it “futarchy.”) He also has contracted to have his head frozen upon his “death,” and has good arguments for why this makes sense at market probabilities and prices. 

Larry Iannaccone’s field of expertise is religion. Larry asks, Is a free market in religion good for religion? Kevin McCabe and his co-authors have the first published paper about running brain scans on people while they make economic decisions. Neuroeconomics, as it is called, is now a major trend in the profession. How many economists are as comfortable talking about Michel Foucault, James Joyce, or Cuban artist Tomas Sanchez as they are about Milton Friedman? Tyler Cowen is, and in a series of books—the latest being Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding—Cowen has challenged economists to think about art and culture—and aesthetes to think about economics. Other economists at GMU are pushing the boundaries of development economics, studying the politics of rational irrationality, and redesigning electricity markets.

The outsider status of both the GMU economics department and the basketball team contributes to their styles of play. We like to have fun, which is one reason that GMU is well-known outside of academia. Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s daily blog, is a widely read source of economic insights. Other faculty blogs include Café Hayek, The Austrian Economists, and EconLog. In old school media, Walter Williams is a nationally syndicated columnist and well-known radio personality and Russ Roberts is the author of an economic romance novel (really!).