The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
At least that is the point being made here:
Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The biggest change in my lifetime is one that is usually omitted by writers and that is the ability to get at almost any piece of information and factcheck everything in real time wthout leaving the comfort of the home or office. When I was at school ‘looking something up’ required what in today’s terms, would be a huge investment of time and effort. I would probably go a stage further and state that this is probably the biggest technological jump in human history in terms of impact on our basic though processes. We no longer have to hold a ‘best guess’ in our mind until we have time to go to an authoritative source. This article actually begins where the thought just outlined ends.
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