The future is about Understanding. Science is a tool for that, more than it's a body of Knowledge. Exploring the broken bridge between data, facts and society.
Facts don't change the world. People do. Especially in complex situations, facts -and Science- are only part of the mix. There could be other reasons, like implementation, economics, politics, strategy… Science is an important anchor, but is only part of the equation; and definitely is not only about pushing the facts by publishing the facts.
What is Science if it's not academia? Is that Data Science? How is that useful? How do we get there? What skills are needed? Who are the success stories? What are the risks? What is the role of Data, Facts and Science in today's Society? How is this related to the 4.0 Industrial Revolution, migrations, populism, climate change or social media?
As a scientist, your credentials, funding, and job, depends on publications and their citations. This constricts the expectation of unbounded inquisitiviness, since there's basically only time to do proposals, and what ends up in a paper.
According to a 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists, 70% of them failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments (50% failed to reproduce their own experiment).
As science evolves we have gone deeper and deeper into fields that need increasing specialization. We have built and endured science into silos, and silos within silos: silos of peers, silos of tools, silos of knowledge.
When we train scientists, not only we expect the best ones to go into Academia, but also not getting an academic position is a sign of not being "good enough".
Shifting from Science as body of Knowledge towards a practical toolset for the World.
Data Science exploded because the private sector started to generate a lot of data, and wanted to make better decisions, leveraging best tools from Science. Roughly 50% of Data Scientists are former academic researchers.
Virtually all STEM education shares various degrees of the same logical, mathematical and abstracted tools. From linear regressions, to waves, statistics and the scientific method of falsable hypothesis via experimentation. These are very transferrable assets.
If it were about facts, Climate Change would not be a debate. There's much more in how people and societies act on facts. There's implementation, politics, economy, strategy, common sense, culture ... Facts, and Science, are a fundamental part of multi-disciplinar approaches.
The digital world, enabled by Science and Tecnology can help provide wellbeing, livelyhoods and resilient societies. Potentially Everywhere, but in practice economically, demographically and geographically unevenly distributed.