Speculations on the Future of the Scientific Method

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Speculations on the Future of the Scientific Method

Kevin Kelly<br>May 04, 2026

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The following essay was published 20 years ago (January, 2006) on my blog The Technium. I edited the intro here, but the speculations are basically unchanged.

The invention of the scientific method is by far our greatest invention. From it pours millions of other inventions at a rapid pace. Without it, new things are only discovered by accident. With it, we continue to expand our knowledge with confidence and increased skill.<br>The scientific method is a process that combines different ideas, accumulated over many centuries of trial. Some of the most iconic ideas in the scientific method were only added recently, such as the randomized double blind experiment, and the placebo, both added within the last 80 years. The scientific method continues to evolve. We have missed its speed because we tend to associate science with academic journals and laboratories, which are mired in the past. But if we consider the scientific method as the generalized way in which we acquire information and structure knowledge, then we can see that this process is vast, rapid, modern, outpacing and underlying all other change. And this “structure of knowing” is due to be accelerated by ubiquitous AI.<br>There is a good chance the scientific method will evolve more in the next 80 years than in the past 80.<br>For instance, we are in the process of scanning all the 32 million books published by humans since the time of Sumerian clay tablets till now. Their true value will be unleashed as we hyperlink and cross-reference each idea in their pages – a technique long honored in research but never before practical on the scale of all-books. We have already digitized and linked all law in English, and half of the scholarly journals released in the last 25 years. This digitization enables machine translation to move knowledge from obscure languages to common ones. It enables text mining to discover patterns found in the library of libraries that cannot be seen book by book. These are but two small points in the transformation of information technology. We see daily accelerations in bandwidth, storage and search – each step hyped by glossy magazines and web blogs which marks them as amusements and diversions, which they are not. The entire frontier of computers, hyperlinks, wikis, search indexes, RFID tags, wi-fi, simulations, and the rest of the techno goodie bag are in fact reshaping the nature of science. They are tools of knowledge. First these innovations change what we know, and then they change how we know. Then they change how we change.<br>Not only will science continue to surprise us with what it discovers and creates, it will continue to modify itself so that it surprises us by new methods. At the core of science’s self-modification is technology. New tools enable new structures of knowledge and new ways of discovery. The scientific method hundreds of years from now will differ from today’s understanding as we add new ways of processing and testing information. As in biological evolution, new organizations are layered upon the old without displacement of the old. The present scientific methods are not jettisoned; they are subsumed by new levels of knowing stuff.<br>What are some technological changes that might enable us to discover, test, prove and know things in the next 80 years? Some of these technologies will alter the scientific method directly but others will arrive for other purposes and then will be found to change how we come to know things.<br>Based on my own active imagination, I offer the following as possible near-term advances in the evolution of the scientific method:<br>Compiled Negative Results – Negative results are saved, shared, compiled and analyzed, instead of being dumped. Positive results may increase their credibility when linked to negative results. We already have hints of this in the recent decision of biochemical journals to require investigators to register early phase 1 clinical trials. Usually phase 1 trials of a drug end in failure and their negative results are not reported. As a public health measure, these negative results should be shared, so journals have pledged not to publish the findings of phase 3 trials if their phase 1 results had not been reported, whether negative or not.<br>Triple Blind Experiments – All participants are blind to the fact that they are involved in an experiment during measurement. While ordinary life continues, massive amounts of data are drawn and archived. From this multitude of measurements, controls and variables are identified and “isolated” afterwards. For instance, the vital signs and lifestyle metrics of a hundred thousand people might be recorded non-invasively for 20-years, and then later analysis could find certain variables (smoking habits, heart conditions) that would permit the entire 20 years to be...