Why the "cloud" may obscure the scientific method (Score 1)

One aspect nobody seemed to address is that although the "Google method" cannot replace science in the sense "it is a substitute for the scientific method", but it may become the prevalent method because of psychological and social reasons.

First notice that not all scientists are created equal. Only a handful of us are in the position or able to create new theories or advance existing ones using data collected by them or others. The body of scientific research is devoted to the collection and publication of (more or less) valuable data. Just look at the scientific papers! Most of it may be summarized this way: "We studied this and this and measured or calculated these and these, and maybe found some correlations." Of course to do this we must know our field of research well enough to be able to determine what kind of data should be collected and how. But as the usage of the "cloud" becomes ubiquitous it may seem to be more economical to just measure everything possible and then finding the correlations using an AI or ANN. In that way we only need to pay a bunch of cheap "sciworkers" who are able to handle the equipments. This means cheaper education and lower costs. And more people can work in "science", which makes good statistics. And hey! Even those with poorer abilities can do it! This will not advance our understanding of the Universe that's true, but who cares if the technical advancements still continue?

And there are other factors to consider.

Even now nobody is able to learn everything there is to know on any field of science or technology. And the situation will worsen. We cannot overcome this by simply prolonging the duration of education. The "cloud" seem to be a solution to this problem. Just take it a step further by automatizing the data acquisition too.

Nowadays more people are interested in esoteric pseudo science then in science, because it's easier to digest, doesn't require hard work and give instant answers to all problems. And we want answers right now! The "cloud" seem to be the perfect solution for this problem too. It's easy to believe that if we have enough correlated data the computer can give the correct "answer" for all of our queries without too much work from our part. So why pay scientists?