It often amazes me that things we research and talk about at IFTF remain relevant for so many years after we have written about them. Just to give one example, when we worked looked at the future of science and technology about five years, I was tasked with looking at the future of sociology as a discipline. One of the subjects that I wrote about was: the advent of simulations in sociological research. As I stated earlier, I wrote about it almost five years back, it is still a relevant topic. Here it is, reproduced from the original:
Quantitative analysis methods in social sciences that use statistical and numerical rather than verbal data, have traditionally been limited by the amount of information and data that can be processed. Researchers have typically relied on smaller sets of variable data and as a result, have tended to use the same information in many different circumstances.
Simulations that take advantage of vastly increased computing power could be used more heavily in the social sciences, eventually becoming the more dominant means of analysis as a method of predicting human behavior.
Computer simulations that borrow methods from applied physics and business decision make it much easier to use a greater range of information and throughly evaluate each alternative. Increased computing power and storage capacity means that there are potentially no limits to the size of datasets and the number of variables that can be analysed and the variables can also be measured across time repeatedly. Social scientists are expected to increasingly use simulation, as they learn to rely on computers and an aleatory (random) approach to knowledge that takes into account the vastness of available data. The big challenge however will be to develop statistical techniques for finding patterns in these huge datasets.
