Projected · 2060
Consciousness Engineering
This chapter is a projection. It follows lines that are already visible and labels the parts that are not yet history.
This is a projection, and it is the first one on this timeline that leans past what current institutions are built to do. Consciousness engineering, as used here, does not mean uploading a mind. It means a workforce devoted to the seam between a person's attention, their tools, and the records those tools keep. By 2060 that seam is likely to be crowded: adaptive systems that learn a worker's habits, medical and neural devices from the previous decades, and workplaces that expect people to live inside software for most of a day.
Someone will be paid to look after the person at that seam. The open question is whether they work for the person or for the employer.
A duty of care for attention
Presenteeism moved from the office to the screen in the 2020s. A further turn is software that notices when you drift and pulls you back, or that drafts in your voice so completely that your own contribution is hard to find. The clinical version of the resulting job looks like occupational therapy and psychology: helping people notice what the tools are doing to their sleep, their memory, and their sense of authorship. The corporate version looks like productivity optimization, which is the same tools pointed the other way.
Splitting those two roles, and keeping the clinician independent of the employer who bought the software, is the labor issue hiding inside the science fiction. A mind-body specialist who reports to the vendor is a salesperson. One who reports to the patient is a professional. The timeline assumes the second will exist, because the first will certainly exist and will need an answer.
Records of the self
Long-running assistants accumulate a record of how a person works, decides, and phrases things. That record is valuable and intimate. Curating it, deleting it, and deciding what may be used to train the next system becomes a service, part archivist and part lawyer. Individuals with money will hire it. Everyone else will accept a default. The inequality is predictable, and it repeats the 1440 pattern in reverse: then, the scarce thing was a copy of a book. Here, the scarce thing is the right to be absent from the copy.
Education changes around the same fact. If a student can produce a fluent result without having practiced the underlying skill, teachers and examiners spend more of their time on oral defense, observed practice, and apprenticeship. Those are old methods. They become employment again because the document stopped being evidence.
Keeping the claim modest
Nothing here requires a breakthrough in understanding consciousness. It requires only that tools keep getting better at imitating the products of attention, and that people keep being employed to produce those products. Both are already true. The specialist is what you get when the side effects become too expensive to leave to the individual.
If the tools plateau, this occupation stays small and clinical, closer to today's sleep clinics than to a new estate of the realm. The projection is the demand, not the metaphysics.
Work that grew
- Attention and tool-use clinician
- Personal-data curator
- Assessment designer for an assisted world
- Independent auditor of workplace monitoring
Work that lost its place
- The unexamined assumption that a person's drafts, voice, and history belong to the platform by default
Companies of this chapter
A projection. The split that matters is who the specialist works for: the person, or the employer who bought the software.
Largest
The major health systems
The only institutions with the clinical authority to look after attention, sleep, and dependence as care rather than as productivity.
Microsoft, Google, and Apple
The likely holders of the long-running record of how a person works, decides, and phrases things.
- Workday
The HR platform where monitoring will be sold, if nobody stops it, because that is where the employee record already lives.
New at the time
Independent audit practices
Firms retained by workers or unions, not by the vendor, to say what a workplace system is measuring.
Personal-record curators
Part archivist, part lawyer: deleting, exporting, and limiting the use of a working life's traces.
Assessment designers
Companies and schools that rebuild exams around observed practice, because a fluent document stopped being evidence.