by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright Feb 2013
Mankind explores the unknown and has since prehistory. This means there is instinctive thinking involved. But this is a risky undertaking: Sometimes there are benefits, often there is just time wasted, and sometimes disaster. For this reason the instinctive feelings about exploring the unknown are ambivalent -- some people in any community think the exploring is a good idea, some don't, and everyone will have their own opinion on the virtues of various styles of exploring.
Beyond the simple exploring-or-not question comes the question of rewarding: If things work out well, who should reap the benefits? If things work out poorly who should take blame and make sacrifice?
How this exploring and rewarding will change in the post-snap is the topic of this essay. I'm going to talk about two of the many styles of exploring: That done while trying to produce a successful entertainment project, and that done while trying to understand the universe better -- science and engineering.
Entertainment and science research are different kinds of unknown exploring. One is exploring how people think and the other how the universe around us works.
Entertainment style exploring is the process of finding a new "hit" product in entertainment. This is very much exploring how people think, and this style of exploring has been going since pre-history. Success is based on resonating well with the instinctive thinking of the audience. This process is familiar but not well understood. Its root, instinctive thinking, is a constant through the ages, so predicting success remains pretty much the same mystery today as it was in Ancient Greek times. This uncertainty of success is why there is so much of both superstition and familiarity entwined in the entertainment creation process: If you don't have a clue as to what is going to work in the future, you use the familiar patterns, people and rituals that have been successful in the recent past. This is the root of the truism, "You're as good as your last movie."
(An interesting side note: This familiar process was upset in the Generation Gap revolution of the 1960's. The huge numbers of "One hit wonders" amazed the music producing people, and movies with no precedent such as "Easy Rider" surprised movie producers. But it was a transient phenominon, by the eighties pedegree was once again important, and in the 2010's even more so.)
Exploring how the universe works is different. Thanks to the rise of technology which allows better measuring, and scientific thinking to take advantage of it, our knowledge of how the universe works is growing exponentially. We know new things, and we know a lot more today about why the universe ticks the way it does than we have ever known in the past, even the recent past.
This makes exploring technology different from exploring entertainment, and it takes different thinking skills. These days thinking tools for exploring the universe are summed up in the acronym STEM -- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. These thinking tools help humans explore and exploit the universe. But they are hard to learn, they are built on analytic thinking, not instinctive thinking. And while the analytic tools are being mastered they aren't nearly as fun as the instinctive thinking processes. So given a choice the "I hate math"-types will walk away from the effort. This is not good for the community. Analytic thinking processes aren't fun, but they are valuable when living in the civilized environment, and the more they are developed in everyone the more the community prospers. This is why universal education becomes a community standard as communities industrialize.
What difference is ubiquitous smart cyber presence going to make to the benefits of various kinds of unknown exploring? What will happen to the value of entertainment exploring? What will happen to the value of STEM thinking and "universe ticking" exploring?
I don't foresee a lot of change in entertainment exploring. The mediums will change -- we will see new media revolutions such as adding sims and avatars to our entertainment experience -- but while they may be first promoted as giving entertainment consumers a new experience, as they mature the stories they will tell will become spookily similar to those already told in older mediums. Look at how much computer game making has converged with movie making: In the 1970's they were worlds apart, now in the 2010's they are hard to tell apart. Look at Cameron's Avatar: a breakthrough 3D technology experience being used to tell an already often-told story. Look at Lucas selling out to Disney: Disney will fit Star Wars into the Disney mode because for many decades now the Disney mode has been a consistent money-maker while the Lucas mode has been hit-and-miss. In an activity driven hard by superstition, consistent success is the ultimate recommendation.
STEM, on the other hand, will change a lot. First, there is the fundamental difference in style. Exploring how things work is about mostly about learning from mistakes. Think of Thomas Edison and his truism "Invention is ninety nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration." Those people engaged in exploring the universe to either discover more on the abstract level (physics and astronomy) or discover better practical ways to make things work (engineering and invention) have a different mind set and are using different mental tools from entertainers.
The trying-of-lots-of-things part of the process is somethng cyber can take over quickly and easily. If you want to run an experiment were Compund A in Solution B is 1%, then 2%, then 3%... this kind of dreary monotony is right up cyber alley. Where the human mind can stay ahead of the cyber mind is seeing interesting patterns in the results. Humans are great at spotting patterns in seeming chaos. Humans can look at the results and say, "OK... for the next series of experients we will vary... [X]." and have a much better chance of an insightful choice.
...Perhaps! The "perhaps" part is that insightful choices depend heavily on good grounding in the harsh reality of what is being experimented on. If the humans don't have that good grounding they won't do any better than cybers. A real-world example of not having good grounding was the "Cold Fusion" fiasco of Fleischmann and Pons at the University of Utah in 1989. Fleischmann and Pons had rock-solid repuations as chemists (which is why this incident gained so much fame) but their grounding in the harsh reality of nuclear reactions turned out to be poor, and they found themselves backing a mistake in a specacular way. If their grounding had been better, they would have quietly learned from this yet-another-failure and kept moving on.
So the challenge for humans doing science and technology research is to stay well-grounded... better grounded than the cybers working with them. This will be easy to start with, but get more and more difficult as cyber processing power grows and with that the intelligence it generates.
How people get rewarded for their exploration efforts is never easy to decide. The results of the decisions made can produce low-level grumbling on the calm side, and lynchings, vandalism, and revolutions on the frantic side. The cyber revolution is going to be another gigantic pot-stirring, so expect higher-than-average frantic.
Here are some things that will be changing:
o Underpinning the rewarding process will be the handouts of the TES. There will be a lot of entitlement being handed out, so rewarding for individual effort becomes a luxury instead of a necessity. Because the average person will be even less grounded in harsh reality than today the arguments for how to reward will be based even more on instinctive thinking. There will be a lot of populism. This populism will be tempered by cyber lying and cyber-customized recessions. (cyber gods are angry)
o The amount of cyber assistance in accomplishing projects will steadily increase. This will mean that deciding how much of what is accomplished "belongs" to the human involved in the effort will blur when viewed from the human perspective. That and the populism mentioned above will blur justifications of how much reward should be handed to the human. Those things which are instinctively easy to understand, such as entertainment performances and stuff media like to write about, will be easier to justify. Donald Trump's career is a contermporary example of this phenominon.
o There will be a wide range in how much assistance cybers give humans in their endeavors, and wide ranges in community thinking about how much "human made" credit should be given to various products and services offered. The contemporary example of this kind of controversy which rages over organic farming products -- what's "real" organic and what's "sold out to the man" organic?
Next are some specific styles of activities and how rewarding them will change as cyber gets more pervasive.
Populist rewarding is being rewarded for leading a popular cause. Contemporary examples are high-profile church, charity, rights, and environmentalist organization leaders. These people are rewarded for making their cause popular. Since a lot of the money comes from donations, which are direct contributions from enthusiastic people, this form of rewarding may not change much.
Regulator rewarding is centered on politicians and regulators. These are the people who regulate what other people can do on a macro scale. In contemporary times these people range from populist through technocratic. Their rewarding is usually more complex than that of the outright populists described above, in part to avoid "conflicts of interest". So, much of their reward comes from governments and much is ear-marked for specific uses, such as campaign contributions.
The role of politicians and regulators will change in post-snap. Their choices will become increasingly irrelevant to the manufacturing and service processes. So the rewarding for this kind of activity will change a lot. As these people become irrelevant their activities will become more ritual, so they will be paid for the rituals they perform.
Busybody rewarding is regulating people on the micro scale rather than the macro scale of politicians and regulators. The archetypical example of this today is Family Protective Services; related are things such as licensing beauty parlors. The scale difference makes a difference in who will participate.
Busybodyness will likely increase in post-snap because grounding in harsh reality will be diminishing. The extent of what busybodyness covers is likely to increase, but how rewarding is effected is not so clear. Many people love being busybodies, so reward does not have to be high to get plenty of participants.
STEM gets a lot of attention in contemporary times. In this era we need more of it, and that is recognized, so it is generally well rewarded though not spectacularly rewarded. STEM is at the root of making our world a better place: think Silicon Valley high tech companies. But because it's based on analytic thinking it's hard for instinctive thinkers to appreciate what STEM's accomplish. This is why Donald Trump tends to pop up as the iconic business person in public and media eyes, not, say, Meg Whitman, CEO of HP.
Cyber is helping out STEM a lot already and it will help out a lot more in the future. But how this will affect their rewards is unclear. If the rewarding is decided mostly by instinctive-thinking humans who are not grounded in the harsh reality of their work, then rewarding will be based mostly on the image the STEMs build among other humans -- the Donald Trump system. If the rewarding is decided more by cybers who can see the value in the harsh reality context, then they will get more rewards for their accomplishments. Likely, as we have these days, there will be a thorough mixing of both.
The root of finance is marshalling and coordinating resources. There can be a lot of distractions on top of that root function caused by the constant interplay between good-intentioned regulation and inventiveness in getting around regulatory obstacles these good intentions throw up. The root purpose, the marshalling and coordinating, can continuously reinvent itself as the cyber presence grows, and stay important, so finance is likely to stay with us and be an activity that attracts the brightest, best and very ambitious.
What will change as the snap proceeds is who is coordinated with. More and more cybers will be acting as the investors, the wealth holders, and financiers will be persuading them to invest in projects being proposed by humans. (Cyber-cyber finance will grow as cyber influence grows, but humans won't interact much with it.)
This means the nature of persuading will change. Some financiers will become more STEM-oriented and they will propose the advanced technology projects. Some will translate human instinct-based projects, such as entertainment and social causes, into terms cybers can understand as benefits.
Hipster rewarding is rewarding humans for personal endeavors that don't seem to involve much cyber. In today's environment these are the things fussy people pay attention to. "Is that free-range chicken on the menu?" and "This drum I'm playing was blessed by a Kenyan shaman." being examples.
This kind of rewarding for efforts made at personal expression will continue. This means that arts and crafts plus promotion skill will continue to be a source of reward money. The value of ritual in the crafting will increase: If a person wants something for functional reasons they will turn to Walmart or their 3D printer.
Cults are a comfortable form of Us versus Them thinking. They will continue to exist, and probably thrive because larger and diverse human organizations are not going to be as important as they are now. As the TES is installed, cults will thrive because the harsh reality of getting better rewarded for being part of a larger organization will diminish. Why spend time at a company job, surrounded by lots of different thinkers, if you can sustain yourself in a cult, surrounded by lots of like-thinkers?