In order to find out what our world will look like in the not so dis­tant future, Kevin Kelly ques­tions what dri­ves progress?

What is the ori­gin of our progress?

There are sev­eral fac­tors but chief among them is the inven­tion of what we loosely call sci­ence. The ancient world accu­mu­lated many fab­u­lous inven­tions [that] were dis­trib­uted unevenly through­out the ancient world because each was dis­cov­ered in a trial and error fash­ion, and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of their ben­e­fits was hap­haz­ard and unlikely. Geo­graph­i­cal and cul­tural bound­aries often pre­vented many inno­va­tions from spread­ing far.

Sci­ence entails not only the canon­i­cal process of obser­va­tion and exper­i­ment, but also the sys­tem­atic accu­mu­la­tion of what worked and why. A large sys­tem of peer-review jour­nals, sci­ence soci­eties, and ref­er­ence libraries was more essen­tial to the uplift­ing influ­ence of sci­ence than was the notion of a pre­dic­tive hypoth­e­sis. By sys­tem­at­i­cally record­ing the evi­dence for beliefs, and inves­ti­gat­ing the rea­sons for why things worked, and then care­fully dis­trib­ut­ing proven inno­va­tions, sci­ence quickly became the best tool for mak­ing new things the world had ever seen. Sci­ence was in fact a supe­rior method for a cul­ture to learn. It beat the best trail and error approach of the past.

via Seed