Thalience is, I believe, the brain-child of Karl Schroeder. It describes a post-science world (or very advanced science) where all science is done by science bots rather than humans. The bots not only do the science, they also ask the questions.
As Schroeder puts it “…it is an attempt to give the physical world itself a voice so that rather than us asking what reality is, reality itself can tell us.”
I think thalience is an interesting idea and may have extra value because by removing human beings and thus human failings from the activity of science, we will get less cheating and conflict of interest in addition to having robots ask really interesting questions we might never think of.
Add to Schroeder’s idea, Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument and you start wondering if we are already living in a thalient world, but just don’t know it.
American Buddhist Net 