Jul 26, 2014

Science as a Craft Industry

Science is constantly changing, and the craft industries that it engenders must change too. Technologies rise and fall, and fashions come and go. In the future, many of the small enterprises of today will be consolidated, and new small enterprises will have to find different niches to fill. Today the most successful craft industries are concerned with software and biotechnology. The craft industries of the future might be concerned with neurophysiology or ecology, with technologies not yet invented or with sciences not yet named. Two facts of life will not change. Science will continue to generate unpredictable new ideas and opportunities. And human beings will continue to respond to new ideas and opportunities with new skills and inventions. We remain tool-making animals, and science will continue to exercise the creativity programmed into our genes.
That is Freeman J. Dyson in 1998 in this article, which I found in one of Lin Ostrom's syllabi. 

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