The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them
Thomas Kuhn, Black-body theory and the quantum discontinuity
Thomas Kuhn, famous for his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, examined the history of science and concluded that humanity’s perceptions of the world change as science develops.
Mehran Sahami (above), a “Googler” and a lecturer at Stanford University, tells his students, “It’s like you are geometers… living in the time of Euclid.” We are going through a scientific revolution comparable to the one Euclid pioneered 2,300 years ago.
And we are going to have to rethink some things. Langdon Winner writes in The Whale and the Reactor, “New worlds are being made… it simply will not work unless human behavior changes to suit its form and process.”
New terms in ICT such as cloud computing and Web 2.0 exemplify the changes that we are currently undergoing. Nearly every action an Internet user performs is recorded, stored, analyzed, and shared with other websites. Each user action on the web creates a butterfly effect, resulting in unintended results such as the action being published on the user’s Facebook wall. This makes the cloud exponentially more powerful than humans. Furthermore, the cloud is so complex that no one can possibly ever know where their information is going. This blog post may (hopefully) get shared on Facebook, posted to Twitter, and then emailed to someone. In that process dozens of mashups will have collected and stored this blog post, or at least a link to it.
What does the cloud mean for society? Surya over at the Silent Eloquence blog pointed out a year ago how the cloud changes an individual’s thought process. In the past if I were to write a journal (I believe that is what we used before blogs) entry about the future of society, I would probably draw a mindmap connecting various thoughts and reflect on my own experiences in society and my own thoughts and ambitions. Today if I were to write a blog entry on the future of society I would probably Google a term such as [future of society]. Odds are that my Google search will provide me with more than enough inspiration to start writing. This clearly marks a dependence on the cloud for basic thought processes.
A few months after Surya discussed this, Wired Magazine ran a cover story titled, “The End of Science.” Wired came to practically the same conclusion as Surya, except on a much larger scale. They believe that this use of data as a first-resort will replace the process of hypothesis. An interesting example is the software that Google uses to translate web pages. Before computers a linguists was required to understand a language completely and even understand the cultures involved. Now, Google’s algorithms can take advantage of billions of cached documents to make sense of language mathematically. From the Wired article:
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. (Wired Magazine, July 2008)
At this rate of progress, it is possible that linguists be as threatened as travel agents? As we communicate through Google Translation, we rely on an algorithm analyzing essentially the sum of all human knowledge. Most users will not be able to begin to comprehend what makes the translation work, but it does. This is merely one example of a complex system that we have created and will increasingly depend on.
