The Sci-fi Career Guide
Or; Neal Stephenson as Guidance Counselor
Tech jobs are vanishing. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Postings for software development jobs are down more than 30% since February 2020, according to Indeed.com. Industry layoffs have continued this year with tech companies shedding around 137,000 jobs since January, according to Layoffs.fyi. Many tech workers, too young to have endured the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, now face for the first time what it’s like to hustle to find work.”
Rui Ma asks the obvious follow-up question: “how are parents of high schoolers approaching career guidance for their kids in light of this?”
The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller offers his own unhelpful, but very honest, response:
Miller’s sentiments echo those of Yuval Noah Harari, who claimed in a widely shared clip that “today nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years.” [Full disclosure: I work at Sapienship, the company co-founded by Harari.]
Most of the responses to Harari involved people trying to isolate those things that they thought would still be relevant in 20 years: “Try Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas for a start”; “Home economics… athletics… math… ancient philosophy”; “The treasures of revealed religion, philosophy, and laws and institutions.” These are all good things! Things that most people should spend more time learning about! But, in the immortal words of Wayne Campbell, they’re “nothing I’d call a career.”
Happily, there is an untapped resource that stumped professors, anxious parents, and ambitious students can all make use of… Science fiction!
Science fiction authors have been thinking about the future of work for ages, and we can all benefit from their foresight. What follows is a career guide for the near future inspired by sci-fi: a compilation of job titles that don’t exist today but may be in-demand professions in the years to come. Descriptions of these speculative jobs are followed by suggestions for courses of study that will prepare today’s students for these occupations of tomorrow.
Planetary Ecologist
Source: Dune by Frank Herbert
In Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic, Doctor Kynes is a planetary ecologist (or “planetologist” as he prefers to be called). On the desert world of Arrakis, Kynes is busy supervising a secret terraforming project. His trade is the study of the innumerable interactions between the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere.
Kynes’s aim is to develop a set of self-reinforcing feedback loops, wherein genetically-engineered grasses capture atmospheric moisture, paving the way for forests and open bodies of water. This manufactured ecology would be totally artificial, but nevertheless conducive to the flourishing of organic life.
Back on earth, we are beginning to identify the “atmospheric bridges” and “oceanic tunnels” that transport matter and energy across the hemispheres, linking distant regions. A study published in 2015 based on lidar data revealed that phosphorous-rich dust swept from the dry bottom of an ancient lakebed in Chad travels on winds across the ocean to eventually settle in the Amazon basin. Once deposited, the dust-borne phosphorous helps replace nutrients lost to runoff and erosion. Given this interrelationship, it seems appropriate to speak of a meta-ecosystem containing both the rainforest and the desert. (I propose we call it “the Sahamazon.”) This ocean-spanning desert-forest is simultaneously arid and tropical, at once barren and biodiverse. One job of the planetary ecologist would be to spot these meta-ecosystems hiding in plain sight.
It is entirely possible that AI systems could one day manage ecosystems autonomously. Bradley Cantrell has drafted a blueprint for an AI “wildness creator” that “creates and maintains wild places independently of humans.”
But as I wrote in an essay some years ago:
As opposed to a game such as Go, which, despite its complexity, has a clear method for assessing victory, it remains an open question what exactly a “winning” ecosystem ought to look like.
What goals should an AI ecosystem-optimizer be given? Carbon sequestration? In that case, expect endless hectares of acacia trees.
As with most discussions about the natural world, our aesthetic commitments tend to masquerade as ethical ones. So even if superintelligent AI systems come along to manage the planet for us, we will still need people with good taste to decide what kind of earth we want to craft.
Recommended college courses for the aspiring planetary ecologist:
complex adaptive systems, climatology, evolutionary ecology, environmental history, synthetic biology, landscape architecture, aesthetics of nature
Daoist Engineer
Source: China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh
In McHugh’s 1992 novel, a construction worker from New York named Zhang Zhongshan manages to land an apprenticeship at an engineering firm that specializes in “Daoist engineering.” As an apprentice, Zhang learns how to plug in to a computerized nervous system. The system expands on its user’s initial design ideas, extrapolating them along certain parameters (energy efficiency, thermal comfort, etc.). It then produces a set of possibilities, from which the user is able to select. This process repeats until a beautiful finished model is attained.
In order to maximize the creative potential of the system, the user must achieve a particular state of mind. To become a Daoist engineer, one must give up the idea of total control, cultivate a capacity for free association, and learn to focus on different parts of the design while simultaneously holding in one’s mind an image of the whole. One must, in Laozi’s words, “be a valley for the world below the sky.”
At one point, Zhang describes the properties of buildings created through this process:
“The way a room is shaped to create heat transfer also allows for efficient use of space, creates offices that have some privacy without requiring that they be walled off, allows enough ambient noise for human comfort and privacy but not so much that noise becomes an irritant.”
Each individual feature contributes to the function and performance of the entire structure, resulting in an interdependent and complex totality. Rather than resembling an artifact of human creativity, buildings made by Daoist engineers appear to be “the result of biological evolution.”
By training to become Daoist engineers, students will be preparing themselves to collaborate with the various forms of machine intelligence that will populate the future.
Already, prompt engineering is emerging as a practice with its own esoteric arsenal of tips and tricks.
(FWIW: I wrote my own take on the future of prompt engineering here.)
Some think prompt engineering is “already obsolete.” Others think it remains “underrated.” Most probably, it will survive in some form, even as the computer learns to convert brainwaves into images. Perhaps the future of prompt engineering looks a lot like McHugh’s protagonist meditations? Prompt engineering could consist of holding mental images steadily in the mind’s eye, letting AI-generated additions bloom in the unthought gaps.
I like to think of a whole generation of Daoist engineers, contemplatively prompting a digital garden out of an algorithmic wild.
Recommended college courses for the aspiring Daoist engineer:
building performance, classical Chinese philosophy, human-computer interaction, meditation, structural engineering, developmental biology, non-Western art history, parametric design
Amistics Consultant
Source: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
In Stephenson’s massive 2015 novel, the disintegration of the moon causes humanity to flee into space and eventually split into seven different groups. A notable feature of this fictional future is the practice of “Amistics.” The practice is inspired by the Amish, whom Stephenson writes, “had chosen to use certain modern technologies, such as roller skates, but not others, such as internal combustion engines.” Stephenson’s novel contains a criticism of “Old Earthers”—that is, us—whose society was “crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned,” but incredibly “sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.”
In the 21st-century United States, we have a surfeit of mobile apps and a deficit of bullet trains, an astonishing array of smart devices and an aging, fraying grid to power them. In Stephenson’s novel, there are norms against social media use, which is deemed harmful to social cohesion, but advances in robotics have proceeded apace. These different priorities have produced a radically different society. In this sense, Seveneves is a study in comparative socio-technological development.
At the heart of the concept of Amistics is an intentional approach to technology. Sitting somewhere between the degrowthers and the accelerationists, the Amistics consultant recognizes that some branches of the tech tree are more worthwhile than others. The aim is a humane connoisseurship of technological adoption.
Following Stephenson, we can imagine a time when states, institutions, and corporations focus less on integrating new technologies into their operations and concentrate more on removing those that produce adverse effects. Amistics is the elimination diet of technology. And it works at multiple scales.
In an age where “industrial policy” is suddenly in vogue again, we see states attempting to guide their domestic tech ecosystems down different evolutionary paths. China is cracking down on video gaming and e-commerce while subsidizing its drone companies. Meanwhile, the U.S. is attempting to reinvigorate its… uh… icebreaker industry.
From individuals trying to become happier more productive versions of themselves to states trying to boost strategic economic sectors (robotic kelp farms, anyone?) there are a lot of potential customers out there for future Amistics consultants.
Recommended college courses for the aspiring Amistics consultant:
science and technology studies, cultural anthropology, cyberpsychology, technology policy, innovation economics, sociology of technology, digital humanities.
Cosmic Sociologist
Source: The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
If humans were to detect alien life on other planets, how could we tell if they meant us harm? This question is at the core of cosmic sociology, a discipline whose founding principles are laid out in the second volume of Liu Cixin’s blockbuster trilogy. The tenets of cosmic sociology are simple:
“First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.”
As lifeforms create civilizations, they spread throughout the universe, but at some point they may come into contact with other civilizations. At this juncture, two additional concepts come into play. The two civilizations will have trouble communicating, so every interaction between them will be characterized by “chains of suspicion.” Furthermore, because technological development is nonlinear, there is always the risk that the opposing civilization will experience a “technological explosion” and soon become an even greater threat.
Because you cannot trust or predict what the other civilization will do, Cixin writes, the rational approach to any and all extraterrestrial civilizations is one of extreme hostility. For this reason, it’s reasonable to stay quiet. Because as soon as someone finds out you exist, they have a motivation to knock you out before you become too big of a threat.
In this state, the cosmos resembles a dark forest filled with solitary hunters waiting for the slightest sign to let loose their poisoned arrows.
This is Liu Cixin’s solution to the the long-debated Fermi paradox. (Though it isn’t my favorite solution, which involves obese aliens with chronic back pain.) Not everyone agrees with the Dark Forest hypothesis. But it would seem like a fantastic idea to get a better sense of its likelihood before we blithely send more probes into space and broadcast more radio messages carrying information about the earth’s location. (Stephen Hawking for one thought this was a terrible idea.)
Cosmic sociologists would investigate the soundness of their discipline’s founding precepts. Must a civilization continuously grow and expand? Can chains of suspicion be overcome with the right tools or diplomatic strategies?
To figure this out, we’ll need better models of civilization’s possible long-term trajectories. And we should study the possibilities for meaningful communication between radically different lifeforms (like whales and AI models). Moreover, we need to broaden our conceptions of what communication in the cosmos might look like. It may only seem that we are in a dark and silent forest because we are not listening in the right places. Perhaps there is lively intergalactic chatter occurring down at the femto scale (10-15) where we aren’t currently paying attention.
Cosmic sociologists could help us answer all these questions and help us know if we should keep our existence to ourselves.
Recommended college courses for the aspiring cosmic sociologist:
biosemiotics, cosmology, information theory, international relations, astrophysics, comparative sociology, game theory, astrobiology.
While this career guide aims to help students prepare for an uncertain future, it goes without saying that colleges and universities will need to adjust their policies to accommodate such wide-ranging courses of study. The “college major” may very well prove to be an artifact of a pre-AI age, when expertise was still expensive. An age when the best doctors and lawyers weren’t chatbots in your pocket.
Very well, I say! Down with the prereqs and the major requirements!
Down with the electives!
Let a thousand sci-fi-sounding college curricula bloom!