I agree with Chris Hillman that Chris Anderson is missing some key things about science, and I also agree that correlation has great importance, while the concept of causality is a tricky one. I believe it was Hume who pointed out that there really is no such thing as causality that is any different from reliable correlation. But Anderson seems to be talking about what I have in the past referred to as "google science", meaning, create a huge database of every experiment that has ever been done under any conditions, and simply interpolate new experiments into that database to achieve predictions of their outcome. We do the same thing all the time in daily life, we simply call it "experience". But science has additional goals, other than just the application of experience to make predictions. Science also tries to unify, simply, and understand-- what science calls an "explanation".

Now, granted we never achieve a full explanation in science, there is always a "but why" question that we will not be able to answer using science. But we do pretty well at unifying and simplifying, at training our thinking to find some kind of underlying structure or logic. That is exactly what "cloud computing" does not need to do, and does not know how to do. It reminds me of when you go to astronomy meetings, and you see countless observer papers showing some observation, and countless simulation papers showing that some complicated set of equations can induce a result that looks like the observations. And that's it, that's all you see-- everyone goes home happy. Except me-- to me, the whole point of a simulation is not to stop when it agrees with observations, but rather to think of that as the starting point. The value of a simulation that "works" is you can than analyze it, to figure out what happened that was actually simple. It's a form of intellectual laziness to skip that crucial followup.

Cloud computing might be one way to move an extra step, where you identify what matters by looking at correlations. But it still doesn't unify, your "theory" always has the complexity of your database and its correlations, and in fact the more complete that database is, the better your theory is-- which is rather the opposite of Occam's razor and the general approach of science. Note that we never knew why that approach actually worked, and Anderson may be arguing that we are limiting ourselves by demanding that it works. But we are also limiting ourselves by dropping that demand. My guess is, cloud computing is a new tool, but not a replacement for the standard approach involving Occam's razor, so I agree with Disinfo Agent there.

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Logic is the grammar of truth.

Meaning and absolute certainty are incompatible, and profound meaning and absolute certainty are profoundly incompatible.

The only thing intelligence is capable of is recognizing itself.