by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright Jan 2013
The Snap is going to happen in a prosperous world here on Earth, and The Snap will make the humans of earth even more prosperous. That will be one of the defining features of the snap. Productivity will spike as the computing power of Earth goes non-linear, so the last vestiges of real poverty will disappear. Most of the human population will be prosperous and urban, some will be getting by and urban, and a few will be ultra-prosperous and urban. The basic necessities of life -- housing, food, transportation, health and entertainment -- will be available to all. (In this world entertainment will become a necessity, more on that later.)
Necessities will be covered, but humans will not be satisfied or greatful. Human emotion dictates that they will take the necessities for granted and will still be wishing, longing and aspiring for things they don't have. It is this mix of human emotion interacting with this Brave New World of mountains of post-snap stuff that is the heart of these essays.
The commodity necessities of life -- the infrastructure behind creating this mountain of goods and services -- will all be cyber controlled. There will some human interaction with this infrastructure, but it will steadily decline in proportion as the computing power grows. In addition to the cyber manfucturers and servers, some humans will still be making things, but most of that will be at the dilettante level. Fully automated factories and driverless cars are examples of what cybers will be taking care of. Locally grown veggies and hand-crafted jewelry are examples of what humans will be making.
This world is prosperous, so it will support a lot of diversity. There are many right ways to do things. This means that urban humans will have hundreds of choices as to how to spend their days. It also means that a few humans will choose not to be city dwellers, and, once again, for diverse reasons.
How diversity is tolerated, and how much diversity is tolerated will be local matters. This is an area that will depend a lot on education and tradition.
One of the general trends of today that will be even truer in the post-snap is the divorcing of life experiences from harsh reality. If each person is guarranteed to get the basics needed for living, then every person will take such basics for granted. This providing of necessities to all will not be considered a worshipful miracle any more than having the light go on when you push the light switch is considered a miracle today.
But these things that are taken for granted have deep effects on how we think, and they change how we act.
This means that another upheaval in human thinking is in progress. This current upheaval will be as profound and unsettling as the change in thinking required by the Indutrial Revolution. Let's consider that for a moment.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution most people made stuff by farming and raising children. Mixed in with the farmers and farmers' wives were other people such as craftsmen, soldiers, priests and nobles, but most people were farmers, farmers' wives, and children who would grow up to be farmers and farmers' wives. And this was not a matter of choice. Harsh reality said, "If you want everyone fed, most people have to be farmers."
The Industrial Revolution was a game changer. It steadily introduced hundreds of new kinds of jobs that out-produced farming, and assisted farming, and thus sucked people off the farms. This was very unsettling to all who experienced it, and is the root of all the new thinking and big crises we have experienced since roughly 1800.
The root of the post-snap trend: With humans being more divorced from the harsh reality of working for their basic necessities, emotional thinking -- from-the-heart-thinking -- will become more and more important. Emotional thinking is easy, warm and fuzzy. There's no reason for humand not to use it... except when harsh reality intrudes to say, "No, that thinking is not working."
Post-snap will have most humans doing a lot more emotional thinking, and making many more decisions using emotional thinking. An example of this today is the Animal Rights movement in its various incarnations.
Think of the game Clue: Think of a mystery set in an English country house. The cybers are the household staff. They are in touch with harsh reality and they get things done in the background while the human personalities such as Col. Mustard and Miss Scarlet run around worrying about "Whodunnit?" in the foreground.
This is the kind of relation that cybers and creations will develop with humans. Most humans will be talking about, and worrying about, things which are either utter nonsense or trivial, and the creations will be saying, "Yes, mum." in response and out of sight of the humans going about running the world in an efficient and orderly manner.