We live in a very strange time. The scientific method has its limits. Experiments are becoming more complex and large-scale and they need to be carried out more and more.
We're building huge hadron colliders to figure out one little question. This will continue until the complexity and scale of the experiments become so great that they become impossible.
This suggests that a crisis is brewing in science as a whole. That soon we will need new revolutionary methods of obtaining objective knowledge about the structure of our world. In this article I will try to grope these possible new methods.
The first thing that comes to mind is to use the achievements of the telecommunications revolution, namely,its main child — the Internet. What might it look like?
For example, our mobile phones can be used for large-scale experiments. Now a special infrastructure is being prepared for this: mobile phones, smart TVs, smart machines, accounts in social networks that are tied to our phones(which have a lot of sensors), which in turn are tied to our identity cards. Thanks to this, we can personalize the impact on the person and get personalized feedback.
For example, we want to find out how a certain psychological impact on a person affects, let's say this is some emotionally colored phrase. We present a certain group of people this phrase, and then fix how increased the frequency of pronouncing the words of interest to us.
We can then vary our phrase and monitor changes in the frequency of words in our experimental group. Don't ask why, I'm just pointing out the possibility (which is just one of many).
But our phones are now capable of very much, they can record even our pulse through the camera, as well as the speed of our movement, our position, etc.it Remains only to create the appropriate software that will collect and analyze all this information.
As you have already understood, the volume of this information will be such that people simply will not be able to process it, and therefore will have to create appropriate systems. These systems are already being created, search engines are their prototype.
We can go even further. Is it theoretically possible to teach a computer to design experiments itself? It's hard to imagine now, but who knows what will happen in 20 years?
Imagine what it opens up prospects: hundreds and millions of experiments conducted in automatic mode. Programs that measure patterns in millions of experiments conducted. Just imagine how this will speed up the scientific search!
Thanks to this system, the laws of the human psyche can be studied in the shortest possible time and thoroughly. We will learn more in a year than in all the previous millennia. What to do with such a colossal knowledge of man? Of course to control it! What else to study man?
And why manage man?
For a long time I thought, and really why? It's simple. Man for some time will be cheaper robots, and therefore need to learn to use it one hundred percent.
To do this, you need to learn how to control his attention. We have already succeeded quite well in this, and with the help of automated scientific search, the control of human attention will become total.
What will the future look like?
In the next 30-50 years, production and almost all labor will become automated, and thus billions of people will be freed. What to do with them? Games! But it won't just be games, it'll be games that make people blind lab technicians.
For example, we need to measure the neutrino flux to the earth. We make fashionable smartphones with neutrino detectors(I sort out ideas in the format of nonsense, I know nothing about neutrinos) and arrange a competition between people so that they catch neutrinos, as they now catch pokemon.
Or we should study the sky. Make fashionable portable radio telescopes with Internet access and arrange a game of catching pokemon in the sky. People do run and direct the telescopes in the right areas of space (there are pokemon).
Thus, we will be able to motivate people to help science, as well as to buy and maintain scientific equipment (it will be an element of the games).
Word, ideas as this can be use-heap.
Now I have described how we can extend scientific activity to the entire planet, but there may be other methods of future scientific research that we can't even think about yet.
I'm imagining things.