There’s a big part of me that thinks that a lot of this talk of Woodward’s is either hyperbole on his part in order to sell his book; it certainly works for me as it has made me want to read it. Or the possibility that he’s being used as somewhat of a dupe in order to convince our enemies that our capabilities are greater than they are. In this sense, it would slow down any enemy’s ooda loop, cause them to maintain radio silence (perhaps even if they don’t need to) and generally keeping undercover.
However, the fundamental fact is that we ARE moving in this direction. We are moving into an era of not just much more powerful sensors but the ability to fuse those sensors together in order to create a knowledge product that is substantially greater than the whole of its constituents. In reflecting on this, one realizes what an astonishing tool for cognition the database is: it not only greatly increases our memory, it increases our ability to synthesize new information from our memory.
Spinoza, writing in the 17th century, understood the power of reason and the power of science. Yes, we have acute powers of observation and the ability to reason about our observations. We can see cause and effect. But reality is so vast, with so many interacting factors, that it is simply beyond the ability of our brains to understand all of it. Ultimately, all learning is about pattern detection and error correction in order to learn which causes lead to which effects. And what we can learn and discover about the universe is limited to the powers of our observation, our time to observe something, and the power of our memory. So as powerful as science is, our own limits of time and perception fundamentally limit science.
Throughout history, the ability of a civilization to produce science has been deeply related to the following factors: the inclination of people to closely observe nature, sufficient economic progress in order to create free time for enough people to do this, the ability of the observers to record their observations, and the ability of others to access those observations. Thus, we see the advent of printing, and later the deep time surpluses created by the industrial revolution as both corresponding to deep increases in the pace of scientific discoveries.
Our very conception of the scientific method basically focuses observation, hypothesis, experiment. We observe events around us which are causes or effects or both. A hypothesis is the assumption that some events are causes which lead to other events which are effects. An experiment is an attempt to initiate a cause in an environment in which other causes are as removed as possible in order to confirm that it leads to the effects we’ve hypothesized. Almost every big scientific breakthrough we can think of has worked this way, and most progress in science has occurred through the development of instruments that increase our ability to perceive reality and methods of keeping records which improve our memory. Kepler’s breakthrough on planetary motion, for example, would have been impossible absent Tycho Brahe’s deep and detailed records. Kepler was a data miner.
The first impact of the computer was to rapidly improve our ability to do calculations. The database has primarily been understood as a way of organizing simple collections of information for businesses: it’s great for keeping track of customers, for example. But we are increasingly moving into a new era of discovery that is characterized by the ability of the database to organize the inputs of multiple sensors and synthesize new information which heretofore had been invisible.
The database empowered by high speed CPUs, vast data storage systems, and high resolution sensors absolutely blows away the limits of science described by Spinoza. If science is limited by what we have the time, perception, and endurance to observe, the development of sensors which can detect more and diskdrives that can remember more, pushes those constraints absolutely over the horizon. We can now observe more, remember more, and compare/contrast those observations at ever more speed. Each of these dimensions of science are growing at orders of magnitude beyond what Spinoza could imagine, and they are not merely growing exponentially… they each are multiplied by their ability to be fused together as the output of data base software.
Science is fundamentally changing right before our eyes. Our popular conception of science has been a lone worker able to discover things due to his observation and concentration being enhanced by a higher degree of isolation than his contemporaries. Now, science is so complicated and based on data sets so absolutely huge that it requires collaboration and computation in order to make sense.
A great example of this is Europe’s achievement with the Large Hadron Collider. Something that could only be built through massive collaboration. But there’s something deeper in the story of the LHC which has been missed in much of the news coverage in recent day: in order to make sense of the data returned, dedicated connections have been established, running under the Atlantic, feeding massive streams of data into the US for all of the data produced to be processed. There’s not enough surplus computer power or storage space in Europe to handle it all.
This is all rather awesome, of course. But it’s not without reason for concern. We already are at a place where the potential for surveillance is greater than anything presented in the darkest fears of science fiction.
