The co-founding editor of "Wired" magazine and author of "Out of Control" is working on a new book on "what technology wants." His research led to the first-ever history of scientific methodology. Starting from this long-term view of science's past transformation, he speculates on how the practice of science will change in the future.
Science, says Kevin Kelly, is the process of changing how we know things. It is the foundation our culture and society. While civilizations come and go, science grows steadily onward. It does this by watching itself.Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers, and that process of research pointing at itself invokes a whole higher level, the emergent shape of citation space. Recursion always does that. It is the engine of scientific progress and thus of the progress of society.
A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future. Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science.