UPDATED: Towards 2020 Science

UPDATE 3/31/06: A colleague pointed out to me that this site reports the same research described in the Nature Web Focus site I mentioned in my earlier post entitled Quickie: 2020 Vision @ nature.com. I haven't delved into either enough to know if I'm being redundant here - apologies if I am. I only have a life where I can read at leisure on the weekends, and both items are in the queue, both of things to read and things about which I hope to say something intelligent sometime in the future.

Many of the blogs that popped up today on one of my trolling searches (Dr. Web's Domain and Psychology and the Singularity, to name a couple) are bombarding me with pointers to Microsoft Research's new site called  2020 Science that encapsulates the results of their "Towards 2020 Science" effort. The description in the opening page's meta tag is this:

2020 Science sets out the challenges and opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences. It seeks to identify the requirements for technology to accelerate a decade of scientific advances, particularly those driven by computational sciences and the new kinds of science the synthesis of computing and the sciences is creating. Already this synthesis has led to new fields and advances spanning genomics and proteomics, earth sciences and climatology, nanomaterials, chemistry and physics.

I have just begun to delve into this, but it seems to be the deep-ocean equivalent of the little frog-pond in which I have been immersed, trying to get my colleagues focused on taking the future potentialities seriously.

Humans suffer terribly from a tendency to assume that what has been and is now, ever shall be, and when it isn't so all hell breaks loose for them.  This happens a lot during paradigm shifts like the dawn of the age of print, the Industrial Revolution, and the emergence of the digital computer. I think it is happening now, for the reasons I set out in my Rogue Wave post and in the 2002 scenario planning paper the blog entry summarized.

We are at a point in history where multiple disruptive information technologies are synergizing to create what I call the Rogue Wave phenomenon (a term I came up with in a "cabernet-sauvignon moment", if I recall correctly). No one understands what is going to happen yet, but folks like the 2020 Science people are giving it a serious go.

<tangent>Ray Kurzweil is another such seer, epitomized in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines", but his vision is more radical than I can handle - we end up becoming optional wetware accessories as our computers, blenders, lawn mowers, and all other machines get networked, pool their computing resources, and gang up on us. They become more intelligent than we are, as revealed in his timeline - all we get in return is interesting conversation with really intelligent robots and - er, well, virtual sensual delights of various sorts. Sounds like the dream future of an MIT engineering undergrad to me, but then I'm a granola type, so who knows?</tangent>

Seriously, though - Towards 2020 Science is going to take time to digest. I'll report on it more as I get a better handle on it.

I gotta go.