Many interesting thoughts have come from my conversations with various people over these last months. Here is one of them:
After future reality reaches its tipping point (as I described yesterday) new forms of entertainment will emerge. Just as movies create a demand for popcorn vendors, restaurants create a demand for waiters and dance parties create a demand for disk jockeys, new sorts of services will start to exist.
For example, if we are all hanging out together in a party situation, and we want to have a fun experience together, we might organize some sort of theater game, perhaps a kind of 21st century version of Dungeons and Dragons, with one participant as designated Dungeon Master.
Except that this experience of thing won’t be limited to Tolkienesque fantasy worlds. We might decide to be characters in a Wild West movie, or space pirates, or dolphins swimming together as we explore an ocean reef.
In all of these cases, the experience can benefit from having somebody at the controls, just as in a dance party a good disk jockey will sense the mood and pick just the right next song to play.
As we gain in understanding about these sorts of experiences, better and better tools will be developed to operate those controls. Eventually some users of those tools will get sufficiently proficient that others will be willing to pay them.
This is completely in line with recent trends in which new economies are being created by combining interactive experience with social networks. For example, a top ranked gamer can already make a decent living on Twitch.
Over time, a new class of professional will emerge, somewhat parallel to the disk jockey or video jockey. Maybe we should call this person an experience jockey.