I recently read an article on the Inner Development Guide and its Thinking domain, which highlights five skills—Critical Thinking, Perspective Skills, Systems Thinking, Long-Term Orientation, and Creativity—as the true upgrade for researchers.
From my perspective, these skills are not just enhancements; they are the essence of what humans bring beyond AI. I’ve written about the pantheistic fallacy—the mistake of projecting human qualities onto AI and assuming it can replicate the full spectrum of human cognition. AI is powerful, but it is not wisdom. It processes data, finds correlations, and optimizes for efficiency. What it cannot do is ask what’s missing or imagine what needs to be discovered.
- Critical Thinking → AI validates hypotheses, but only humans interrogate the assumptions behind the questions.
- Perspective Skills → AI merges data, but humans bridge science with lived experience, culture, and meaning.
- Systems Thinking → AI maps connections, but humans perceive paradox, cooperation, and emergent properties.
- Long-Term Orientation → AI optimizes for immediate goals; humans imagine regenerative futures and purpose-driven trajectories.
- Creativity → AI recombines patterns; humans risk failure, leap into the unknown, and dare to ask what if.
This is also where open science becomes essential. These human capacities flourish most when knowledge is shared, not siloed—when researchers build on each other’s insights, challenge assumptions openly, and collaborate across disciplines and cultures. Open science creates the conditions where critical thinking, systems thinking, and creativity can scale across networks rather than remain isolated within institutions.
The future of science will not be defined by AI alone, but by scientists who can leverage AI as a human gain‑of‑function—amplifying our ability to see what’s missing, question what’s assumed, and explore where the undiscovered awaits.
Read the original article: Science Needs More Than Data: Have You Led Your Own Thinking Yet?
#OpenScience #AIgovernance #PhilosophyOfScience #RelationalThinking #AugmentationNotReplacement #CarloRovelli #SciencePolicy #EpistemicHumility #SystemsThinking #ProvenanceMatters
