Currently, in most fields, the foremost experts are humans. They form a culture that pushes on the envelope of knowledge, uncovering facts and developing methods.

Already, machine intelligence is able to uncover facts, and increasingly develop methods. But those facts still by and large are integrated into human knowledge through interpretation and broadcasting: the structure they fit in is still human on its foundation.

This must change when the envelope of all knowledge departs from the envelope of human understanding: old methods won't uncover new facts after a point. New methods might be unintelligible to humans.

Human experts who develop human-understandable methods form an expert culture (or many partially overlapping cultures, but that's beside the point). Peer reviews, evidence-based interventions, standards of significance; beliefs, assumptions, shortcuts; recruitment, initiation, selection; rites and rituals. The whole human gamut.

Excluding the possibility of one unified consciousness, some type of overmind, the machine experts will form networks of collaboration, fact interpretation, and fact broadcasting. They will form an alien kind of culture, with its own methods and supporting beliefs, assumptions, shortcuts, rites, and rituals.

Humans' lot is that of a student, absorbing established theories, no longer a frontier expert climbing a lonely peak for the first time, groping for fast handholds. And maybe it is well! Swimming in the sea of existing facts and methods, perhaps interpreting them to human understanding for the first time. New human theories, yet already refined in meaning and applications already when obtained.

It will be exciting to meet the aliens, and learn from their culture!