Future of Job Search: Episode 5

April 8th, 2008

Work and play in 2100- at the same time

The new job turned into an ongoing brainstorming session. Johnny found himself working with a global population of people related to his work. The new organic processors were now showing some signs of being far more than just what they’d been designed to be. That had brought in biologists, neurologists, and some of the big global corporate players, like Googlesoft and Yahspacebook.

“Work” had become advanced science. Even new physics were involved, including field theory, the new electromagnetic science which was revolutionizing communications and space travel. Johnny and Maria’s new baby had arrived at the beginnings of a world even her under-30 parents hadn’t imagined possible.

In 2100, it was a matter of principle to move regular non contract workers from job to job periodically. The idea was to keep them current with their multiple jobs, and avoid stress and skills stagnation. Everybody on Earth was now in an ongoing training mode, because that was how rapidly science was changing the world. Depression was now almost unknown, an old disease.

Vocational Science, which was an offshoot of the old Human Resources discipline, had come a long way in the past century. People were no longer allowed to work in menial or degrading jobs. The International Global Employment Laws also prohibited humans from doing work assigned to the multiple varieties of robots. “Human work for human beings” was the old labor movement cry of the 2050s, and that was the result.

Everyone benefited. Industrial safety in 2100 was so good, insurance premiums dropped to their 1950 rates. Health care found itself looking for new things to entice customers. The move out of the “office” environment had practically freed the human race from all its Industrial Era problems.

Despite which, Johnny now found himself dealing with whole new concepts of life, and whole new sciences, let alone IT. He was fortunate enough to be involved in the development of the first neuro-game, a thing called Agility. The game had been invented in the course of finding out if the organic processors could operate on wireless frequencies, trying to avoid having to turn their data into a hardwired connection to a Thing In A Box. The processors did better in a natural atmosphere, with enough oxygen and nitrogen, and nobody wanted to have to confine them into some goldfish-like situation, where they were dependent on machines.

The research showed that the processors could also pick up microscopic fields, let alone wireless transmissions. They were sitting in a small, artificial micro field in a dish and one of the researchers happened to have a test screen recording, when someone told him a joke, and he fell out of his seat laughing.

On the screen, the processors responded with a mass of lines, shapes, signals, and other information. The recording was so complicated it took a space agency to turn the data into something meaningful to anyone but the processors. They’d picked up a range of neurological reactions from the guy laughing his head off, and faithfully relayed it as data.

More tests, and it was found that anyone could communicate directly with the processors, even subconsciously. Then they found that you could do “brain art” with this effect. Images of shapes never before seen were soon cluttering Johnny’s time as he tried to create a network around the new system. Some of the researchers had to be reminded to sleep and eat.

Agility, the brain’s first, and some say best, field-based game, was born. It was later called “The Game That Changed The World”.

The game involves creating shapes and structures, consciously. The computer awards points for construction, design, speed, accuracy, (It can do 10 million dpi, even if humans can’t), and “integrity”, which is consistency of image. Integrity is pretty tricky, because it involves great mental focus.

Some people can do Da Vinci drawings on an Agility screen, from memory… That’s how competitive Agility can be.

A further level of the game includes “Originality”, which means the image is checked, a dot at a time, for original content. This weeds out copycats, and is a big status thing among players. The top international players are rated over a million points. The joke is that you don’t get rated for originality until you’re over 16, because younger kids, left to themselves, often score over that number. Someone said that the greatest, most original, Agility player on Earth would have to be under five.

Agility was Johnny’s problem, from day one. He had to literally create the system, turn it into a network, create the readers, the codes, and the backups, and practically reinvent the receiver fields so they could work reliably in a network. He learned field science, transmission dynamics, neurological interfaces with computers, signal refining, and the kind of code required to read them. The code was in Quaternary, which is a four character form of binary. It’s millions of times quicker than binary, and at neurological speeds, not much else works.

Johnny had more problems with “leaky” signals than most people have with taps, but eventually he secured the processors and receivers so they kept out the several gigawatts of radio transmissions covering every part of the Earth, and even solar flares. He won an award, almost in passing, for creating the first secure wireless fields, which were also later used to protect satellites and spacecraft.

This wasn’t as tough as it might sound. Johnny was an Agility fan from the second he saw what it could do. His little daughter, now old enough to look like she was about to walk, was in the room with a test screen running, when her brand new fluffy animal was given to her by her mother. The Agility screen went nuts, and produced images any Impressionist would have loved, including a graphic version of the fluffy animal. (It’s very rare, ever, to get an actual first sight image of an object, even with experienced players. Theory is that it means very clear perception and mental processing.)

The screen was recording, so in the family database are the stills and replays of this parent-overwhelming moment. In 2100, family memorabilia is multimedia, and there’s a lot of it.

They were probably the first people on Earth to do that. It’s since become a sort of global parental ritual.