As part of a series of seminars sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, a number of innovative thought leaders (including Jared Diamond, Clay Shirky and Bruce Sterling) have shared their vision of the future. On March 10th, Kevin Kelly (one of the co-founders of Wired magazine) offered his views on “The Next 100 Years of Science”, explaining long-term trends in the development of the scientific method. Some of the ideas are simply mind-boggling and, truth be told, a bit daunting (”zillionics”? “combinatorial sweeps”?). Thankfully, Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation has provided a brief overview:

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.

3) Computers will keep leading to new ways of science.

4) New ways of knowing will emerge.

5) Science will create new levels of meaning.

As Kelly points out in his talk, entirely new concepts of learning and meaning will evolve over the next 100 years (point #4 above):

“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. (In the Q&A, one questioner predicted the coming of the zero-author paper, generated wholly by computers.)

Overall, Kelly cites at least 14 different advances in the scientific method that could occur within the next 50 years, including Combinatorial Sweep Exploration, the Multiple Hypothesis Matrix, Deep Simulations and Hyper-Analysis Mapping.

[image: Dave Dorman]

The Wall Street Journal ran a great story (”Racing to Improve”) on Friday that nicely illustrated the benefits of thinking about your business from a completely new perspective. In this case, United Airlines ground crew employees attended a North Carolina school for NASCAR pit crews (i.e. Pit Crew U) in order to learn about teamwork, speed and efficiency. Think of it as a hands-on team-building exercise that forces employees to think outside the box. One day, you’re loading and unloading airplanes, the next day you’re removing lug nuts from a high-performance race car.

So why is United Airlines sending its ground crew employees to Pit Instruction & Training school?

“They aren’t about to turn airport runways into race tracks. But UAL Corp.’s United hopes some training in the split-second practices of NASCAR pit crews will help Ms. Rivera and her colleagues slash the time that United’s 455 jetliners spend on the ground. Less time on the ground equals more time aloft. That means more daily flights without having to buy new planes and - the airline hopes - more revenue.

The pit-crew experience is intended to reinforce the importance of such things as teamwork, preparedness, and safety. It’s one small but important way United is trying to become more efficient after emerging from three years of bankruptcy court protection last month.”

Tags: PitCrewU NASCAR United innovation

[image: NASCAR]