Impact of Future Intelligent Information Technologies on the Methodology of Scientific Research

The impact of future Information and Communication Technologies on different spheres of human private, professional and social life attracts a growing attention of a broad public. In particular, the question whether the deployment of intelligent systems will be a chance or a threat to mankind has been considered by many researchers recently. This paper is devoted to an estimation of advanced ICT tools impact on the modes and progress of scientific research in various areas. We will present and discuss the development prospects of selected intelligent technologies such as Global Expert Systems (GES), bi-directional Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI), or Creativity Support Systems (CSS). The forecasts of their development until 2025 has been presented in a series of papers resulting from a recent ICT foresight project. The above mentioned technologies are supposed to allow scientists to compete with the growing capabilities of intelligent systems to make autonomous decisions in dynamically changing environment. Such systems are referred to as Artificial Autonomous Decision Systems (AADS). We claim that a future scientist endowed with joint capacities of human brain and new technologies will be able to cope with big scientific data growth which exhausts the capacities of any individual researcher. We will present and discuss scenarios that may dominate the development of future scientific methodology. The first one will rely on automation of research, i. e. letting automated expert systems select and process knowledge up to the stage of an edited scientific paper, with relatively minor and ever-decreasing human intervention. The other assumes an intensive development of BCI as an enabling technology for future advanced hybrid intelligent systems. All mitigating approaches are expected to merge, but other optimistic or pessimistic scenarios are also possible. These will be discussed in the Conclusions section of this paper together with recommendations to researchers and R& D policy makers.