Specialization. Yes. I’ve been making an induction puzzle game over the past couple of years. It takes place largely on the workbench of a reverseng (derivation: Reverse Engineer) employed by a drone factory that is situated in a late industrial society (a few years after creating misaligned AGI, so hardened by its state of biological warfare that it will last a few years yet).
One of the organizing principles that has allowed your world to run so terrifically fast is “Specialism”, which holds that a person’s profession should cast a long shadow over their entire lives. Most of us are edited straight from the germline, and then we begin our training at birth. The notion that a person would choose their specialization is mostly extinct, and discussed rarely, when it is discussed, it is depicted fantasistically, a little bit like love marriages in India. They happen, they’re normal in many elite subcultures, but most of us know why they wouldn’t be right for us.
Your training presents you with narratives, the narratives frame your specialization (spec) as the backbone of history, the girthiest load-bearing column, holding up the weight of the whole world. As a child, your media diet is well controlled, as it must be, and by your teen years, the media of other specs, of the same age group, will have grown incomprehensible or uninteresting to you, as if it were written in a different language, for a different belief system, dressed with an alien’s sense of beauty. When you enter the workplace, you will have to interact harmoniously with these aliens. Learning to admire them is the final part of your training. It wont be easy. They are deeply unlike you, and even though you are each proud of your spec, you need each other, they can do things you never could, you will love them for their difference.
There will be partings in these black thickets, glimpses out into a calmer world, a world that is doing a lot more rumination, and a lot less hurtling. This other world may, or may not survive these glimpses from our creatures of the black thickets. That will be up to you.
I don’t think the world belonging to Specialism is a good one. Everything moves too fast here. Philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, have none of their hands on any of its reigns, instead, market forces looking for 20 years returns, its homesteads pumping out specials like puppies from a mill. But I can’t help but internalize Specialism, a little bit. It is practical. I am finite. I can only be a few types of thing, I can only make a few humble contributions to the global product. Better I approach them with absolute devotion. As a forecaster I’m permitted the relief of looking out over the needs of the future and figure out where I’d fit into them. I get to figure out what I ought to be before becoming it. Most people don’t have that. It would be nice if there were some higher civic process that could give this clarity to everyone. It would have been nice if it could have given some clarity to me back when I was wandering deserts.
Specialization. Yes. I’ve been making an induction puzzle game over the past couple of years. It takes place largely on the workbench of a reverseng (derivation: Reverse Engineer) employed by a drone factory that is situated in a late industrial society (a few years after creating misaligned AGI, so hardened by its state of biological warfare that it will last a few years yet).
One of the organizing principles that has allowed your world to run so terrifically fast is “Specialism”, which holds that a person’s profession should cast a long shadow over their entire lives. Most of us are edited straight from the germline, and then we begin our training at birth. The notion that a person would choose their specialization is mostly extinct, and discussed rarely, when it is discussed, it is depicted fantasistically, a little bit like love marriages in India. They happen, they’re normal in many elite subcultures, but most of us know why they wouldn’t be right for us.
Your training presents you with narratives, the narratives frame your specialization (spec) as the backbone of history, the girthiest load-bearing column, holding up the weight of the whole world. As a child, your media diet is well controlled, as it must be, and by your teen years, the media of other specs, of the same age group, will have grown incomprehensible or uninteresting to you, as if it were written in a different language, for a different belief system, dressed with an alien’s sense of beauty. When you enter the workplace, you will have to interact harmoniously with these aliens. Learning to admire them is the final part of your training. It wont be easy. They are deeply unlike you, and even though you are each proud of your spec, you need each other, they can do things you never could, you will love them for their difference.
There will be partings in these black thickets, glimpses out into a calmer world, a world that is doing a lot more rumination, and a lot less hurtling. This other world may, or may not survive these glimpses from our creatures of the black thickets. That will be up to you.
I don’t think the world belonging to Specialism is a good one. Everything moves too fast here. Philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, have none of their hands on any of its reigns, instead, market forces looking for 20 years returns, its homesteads pumping out specials like puppies from a mill.
But I can’t help but internalize Specialism, a little bit. It is practical. I am finite. I can only be a few types of thing, I can only make a few humble contributions to the global product. Better I approach them with absolute devotion. As a forecaster I’m permitted the relief of looking out over the needs of the future and figure out where I’d fit into them. I get to figure out what I ought to be before becoming it. Most people don’t have that. It would be nice if there were some higher civic process that could give this clarity to everyone. It would have been nice if it could have given some clarity to me back when I was wandering deserts.