
The History of the Future – how history on our era might be done - ntang
http://blairreeves.me/2018/04/24/the-history-of-the-future/
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WhompingWindows
I agree with the overall premise, that it will be truly overwhelming for
future historians to sift through the terabytes of historical information we
are now accumulating. Even the US President's current output on Twitter and in
speeches, debates, interviews - it's a massive corpus of information that the
average human is hopeless to wrap their memory around. Furthermore, there is
also the issue of whether or not data is locked up in servers, like Gmail,
whereas previously letters or diaries would be open to family/biographers
after the fact.

"It could be that future researchers will be required to form hypotheses
first, which they then must test for explanatory power against the “historical
record” that only AIs can actually query in its entirety. This would be a
remarkable flip of the traditional model of historical inquiry, in which
researchers use primary sources to then form explanatory theses."

This is great in theory, but I think this is an optimistic view of how history
is done. Humans are inherently biased, and historians very often fall into
ideological camps and approach questions with preconceived notions about what
the answers might be. Why should historians be immune to these effects, when
we know from sociological/psychological research into the scientific method
that researchers do indeed have their interpretations colored by their a
priori beliefs.

