by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright June 2014
In modern times as well as ancient times it has been common for some seekers of truth to do so by trying to pierce the veil of reality to seek the deeper truths that lie behind it. Truth seeking has many roads. Post-Snap truth seeking will pick up an additional twist: Some veil piercers will be seeking real world reality itself, not some beyond-reality. They will be working with cybers to learn analytics and hard sciences and the way the real world operates so they can change the world, the real world, in meaningful ways.
They will be continuing the kind of work that scientists and engineers of today do. The difference from today is that they will be doing this in a world filled with cybers who are intelligent enough to be doing the commodity level work in these fields, so what humans engaged in these analytic professions will be working on has to be even more special and advanced than it is today.
And this will be a world where few humans engage in this kind of learning. In the Post-Snap world more and more humans will be less concerned with sciences because it will be more and more irrelevant to their lives -- they will not doing manufacturing or service for a living so how harsh reality operates will not be deeply important to their lives. Other things, such as gossip, fads and entertainment, will be much more important.
Here are some of the occupations that these remaining Post-Snap-style Veil Piercers will be engaging in.
There will still be business people and financiers. Cybers will directly control production, but these are the people who advise them. Financiers of today control the flow of resources between investors and projects that can be invested in, and that aspect of their job will flow through to Post-Snap. They will advise the cybers on how to allocate those resources that are visible to humans. (much of Post-Snap productivity will be invisible because of the complexity that cybers will be able to handle)
Business people will marshall a mix of human and cyber resources to take on human-related projects which cybers can't figure out easily. They will be concerned with designing breakthrough products that can be the templates for subsequent knockoff cyber activity. Think of Apple's role in developing consumer product breakthroughs after Job's return in the 2000's.
One of the unknowns of Post-Snap is how intellectual property (IP) will be handled. These days how it is handled seems cumbersome and emotion-filled. It is likely that in the cyber world IP issue handling will be a lot more streamlined. But humans may not appreciate the streamlining, they may want to keep the lengthy arguing rituals. So where cybers and humans interact on IP issues is likely to become one of the areas where cyber lying is likely to become common. I envision that in the Post-Snap world some people can enjoy IP trolling, but what they find won't match reality very closely. The trolling will be yet another way humans can pseudo-game the system and gain lots of personal satisfaction from doing so, and the cybers will be hiding from the trolls how they are really doing things.
More and more humans will supply the 1% part of invention -- the inspiration -- while the cybers will handle the 99% perspiration part. But... for humans to supply that one percent they will have to be thoroughly grounded in the harsh realities of the worlds they are exploring. This will be a difficult challenge. They will have to learn how to perspire while they are training for a role even if they don't do much of it in their day-to-day work when they finally land the role.
An example of what they will have to know comes to mind: In 2011 there was a science news flurry when it was reported that neutrinos from the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) on the Franco-Swiss border were getting to a detector in Italy at faster than light speeds. This was news for weeks until it was finally determined that a faulty optical cable was screwing up the timing measurements between LHC and Italy. Discovering that flaw took perspiration.
Disasters are always surprises. This puts them out of the realm that automation can easily handle. For this reason disaster response will be human-dominated for much longer than many current human endeavors. And this is a field of human activity that instinctive thinking supports -- people get warm and fuzzy over the prospect of helping others in time of desperate need.
But to do disaster response well is going to require training. As in, good, hard-headed analytic thinking. This is going to put the profession at odds with the many emotional-thinkers who want to get into the activity. There will be sorting out. If it is done well, it will be picking those people who can train well and learn to improvise well. If the sorting is done poorly it will become just another form of hazing, and it will be picking emotionally dedicated people, not cool-headed analytic thinking people.