The Future of the Hypothesis

This chapter evaluates two possible futures for the hypothesis in scientific thinking in the age of Big Data. In one, the Big Data Mindset entirely shuns hypotheses and the scientific goal of understanding nature, settling instead for correlations teased from gigantic datasets by computer algorithms that even their developers don’t understand. In the other, Robot Scientist becomes capable of designing and executing complex though constrained hypothesis-based experiments. The day of the Robot Scientist has already dawned in the form of a fully automated laboratory that can experiment on simple organisms. The Robot Scientist and the Big Data Mindset take diametrically opposed approaches to scientific thinking. The Big Data Mindset is represented by the rise and fall of Google Flu Trends, a program that tried and failed to predict the outbreak of flu epidemics by analyzing disorderly masses of internet search terms. The Robot Scientist deals with Big Data intelligibly via neural networks and translations of logical natural language concepts into computer-friendly motifs. They are both enormously powerful strategies for exploiting opportunities afforded by Big Data, and today both have serious limitations. The Big Data Mindset renders people impotently dependent on its calculations; the Robot Scientist can’t invent truly innovative hypotheses. Nevertheless, we are very still early on in the computer revolution and both the Big Data Mindset and the Robot Scientist promise to work drastic transformations on the worlds of science and scientific thinking as their powers increase.