to non-fiction index ... to science and insight index
"The snap" happens when cyber is both advanced enough and plentiful enough to take over most manufacturing and service activities. The final transition will happen quickly, over about a decade. The snap will bring with it an enduring economic recession for humans, comparable to the late 2000's Great Recession and anemic recovery in the early 2010's, and to the 1930's Great Depression which happened as the Second Wave Industrial Revolution changed how people lived. The deep dislocation will happen for two reasons: Because humanity will once again have to be searching for what to do next as the current boom cycle ends, whatever that happens to be at the time, and because recessions are times for social dream changing -- times when people change their aspirations. (An example of this being Japan's "Lost Decade" (see my article)). And with cyber handling most production and production-related services after the snap, what humans aspire to do will have to change a lot.
The big difference between the snap recession and contemporary ones is that in this one humanity can transition to a mostly entitlement lifestyle and the cyber-controlled system will sustain it quite handily. Universal health care, shelter, food, transportation and education will become the rule of the day. It will be "the Entitlement State that finally works". So the large majority of people are going to have to find their meaning in life in activities that have little to do basic sustenance or manufacture. This is a big change in human circumstance and it will bring about another big change in human thinking. It's comparable to the change that fired the unrest of the 20th century, which caused two world wars and a Great Depression.
Most of those people who want to keep doing something meaningful will be relegated to artistry of some form. They will create art and entertain -- themselves and cybers. Artistry will remain human because it is based on instinctive "from the heart" thinking, and this is something that humans will still do better than cybers.
This is a world where humans are divorced from having to work to survive. But humans will still have unfulfilled material wants and desires, and striving to get material things will still command a lot of human attention. How that striving will be channeled will be one of the big experiments of the post-snap times. How meaningful the harsh taunt, "Get a job!" will be remains to be seen. But there will still be services and material goods that will be in high demand and limited supply. So there will still be important forms of "work at something, get paid for your work" existing. What they will be is not easily predicted.
It is likely the artist/patron relation will survive, and thrive, in various contexts. This is an instinctively comfortable human-human relation.
This will be a prosperous society. This means it will be a diverse society -- humans can live in many ways and think about the world in many ways. There will be thousands of "right ways" to live. Much of human society may become the high tech version of contemporary Highland New Guinea Stone Age village living, where each valley has its own tribe and each of those has their own right way of living. As an example of a different way of living, I think of the parents' lifestyle in the movie "Ruby Sparks" -- the parents are living a distinctive, prosperous, Northern California country living lifestyle which is quite different from that being portrayed in the movie "Arbitrage" -- a New York City lifestyle.
The dark side of this is that Us versus Them thinking will likely become strong again. This will happen because it is the cybers who have to coordinate globally, not humans. Human society will loose the strong push from global economics harsh reality to "Think Globally" in order to gain local prosperity. This dark side will be local-oriented provincialism and gangsterism of various forms. A contemporary example of this is the gossipy, acrimonious 2012 election campaigns being conducted by both Republicans and Democrats. To combat this problem -- if it is decided that it is a problem -- the cybers may set up an artificial economic reality which promotes thinking in terms of bigger groups. In other words, to "make a living" people are going to have to deal with other groups around the world. The cybers will adjust human economic reality to make this kind of global interaction profitable.
A surprise use of a technology, in this case economics: designed recessions. Will the cybers bring about "designed recessions" for humans to experience as a tool to promote human social dream changing?
I can see the post-snap economic situation resembling that of modern Greece's between joining the Eurozone in 2001 and its debt crisis crash in 2009. In that Golden Age era many government jobs were created and financed with newly available debt financing. The social peace bought with all these new jobs was substantial, but the unforeseen consequence was that the relevance of these jobs to helping the Greek economy thrive was small. This irrelevance caught up with Greece in 2009, but if the post-snap cybers are doing 90% of the economic legwork, there's no reason this irrelevance has to catch up with a post-snap economy -- jobs are just another way of keeping humans happy, they are not relevant to productivity or economic output.
So booms and busts can be used by cybers to make and dissolve jobs. Recessions can become another social tool. Worrying about work is an instinct. Job uncertainty is just another way of using instinctive thinking as a social manipulating tool.
How entitlement jobs are created and destroyed needs some thinking about. It is likely the jobs will be created and controlled by politicians and bureaucrats, who will still exist. But what drummer will they be marching to? Who allocates their funding?
A second-tier surprise consequence is that these "designer hard times" will also afflict directly human-supporting creations, such as creation personal assistants. They will be put out of work as well. This may lead to moral outrage in some segments of the cyber community for this pain infliction. Most of this pain and outrage will be handled out of human sight, but there may be surprises.