Science and Entrepreneurship

Last month's cover story in Wired was "The End of Science." It included a prefatory essay by Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail) and a series of short, illustrated pieces on why the "data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete." The basic idea was that we have entered "The Petabyte Age," in which massive amounts of data and data analysis have replaced Karl Popper's conception of science as a desultory process of conjecture and refutation. Here is the pitch:

"Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and   understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn't just more. More is different."

Obviously, Wired is out to sell magazines, and extravagant claims like "The End of Science" are one way to do that. (It certainly caught my attention on an airport newsstand.) But when you scan a site like Many Eyes, or read about massive Philip K. Dick-sounding server farms in rural Oregon, you begin to wonder about the impact of unimaginable amounts of information on science and, inevitably, entrepreneurship and economic growth.

It is clear that science, writ large, is an important component of growth. In the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, many innovations came from what we would today call amateur or applied scientists. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, corporate research labs were prominent. And in the last fifty years, academic research and its role in commercialization has moved to the center of entrepreneurial growth. (Here is an interesting article attempting to relate Kuhnian paradigm shifts to waves of entrepreneurship.)

I'm not saying we have arrived at the "end of science"--it seems highly doubtful that such a milestone would ever be reached while humanity exists--but science clearly goes through transitions and this would have to affect entrepreneurship and growth. I don't pretend to know how, to any degree, massive data analysis will shape the paths of future entrepreneurs, but they will. (And, of course, several of the vignettes in the Wired story are examples of entrepreneurship.)

But it's probably something worth pondering. Entrepreneurship itself can be seen as a form of science, at least in the Popperian sense, or as an example of abductive reasoning.

I don't really have a conclusion here, other than to say that there are often deep, long-term forces that shape economic change, notwithstanding contemporary policy debates that seem to assume, in my mother's words, that we were all born yesterday.

Comments

[Michael F. Martin]

I was reminded of Lord Kelvin's prediction at the end of the 19th Century that physics would be confined to filling in the next decimal place. Rutherford's discovery of subnuclear structure came shortly thereafter.

[Charles Johnson]

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[Cheap Jerseys]

I was reminded of Lord Kelvin's prediction at the end of the 19th Century that physics would be confined to filling in the next decimal place. Rutherford's discovery of subnuclear structure came shortly thereafter.

[Penis Enlargement]

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