One Person Hypothesis And The Purpose Of Everyone Else
One teacher can teach the whole world today. For all of human history, knowledge was spread pretty slowly and the need for teachers was needed everywhere. Not anymore.
One musician can entertain the whole world today. Before we invented phonautograph, if a person wants to be amused by music, it takes enormous luck to be born in a city where musicians play frequently or it takes effort and wealth to travel to the place where the musicians play. It has gradually become almost free to listen to all sorts of music around the world.
One person can destroy the whole world. Not just in one way. It is not just the nuclear way but through multiple departments. It could even be by releasing rapidly multiplying intelligent rodents.
Okay, the above are low-hanging fruits for the One Man hypothesis. Hard questions now,
- Can one person serve food to the whole world? — Nope. Not today.
- Can one person be a doctor to the whole world? — Nope. Not at least until we all get chipped and become IoT devices ourselves.
- Can one person stitch clothes for everyone in the world? — No. But one organization can do!
One Organisation
Okay, one person is a bit of a stretch. Let us talk about one organization (which can be owned by one person) doing the work of all regional businesses.
Let’s address some more conceptions.
“A monopoly is wrong!” — If I am Usain Bolt, am I going to give up on my next race? If you can do something much better than everyone else that makes you eligible to acquire the whole user base, will you give space to other companies out of empathy?
“No, these organizations get into the grey and dark grey areas to retain the status of monopoly!”. — Yes. That is unethical. But, If they attain the monopoly status purely with their intellectual and proprietary assets in an ethical way, is that okay? Or still dangerous?
Google seems to have ~90% search market search having bing and yahoo with almost negligible proportions. If bing and yahoo die, The world stills works (maybe even better). The same goes for many other technology companies. The bigger they get, it seems like it gets harder to beat them.
Agar.io
Think about the game agar.io where we eat the smaller guys to grow. The smaller guys have to find further smaller guys to eat to grow. How does this game not get dominated by one monopoly guy eating everyone else? The game puts one key restriction.
Smaller blobs move faster than larger blobs
The real world would not necessarily work in that way. We can argue how startups can move faster. But still, how many startups that hit gold will resist the hefty acquisition offer? It is like being eaten in a win-win way leaving the bigger company much bigger.
Humans! What is your profession? Problem Solving!
Technology is complexly proportional to the man power needed to operate it.
In a naive look, it seems like the more we optimize a problem, the fewer people needed to overlook it. but one good thing is it has always helped us to find new opportunities!
We have always been problem solvers. The invention of fire might have reduced the burden of additional security personnel needed at night. But unanimously improved the lifespans of human beings by letting us sleep well and explore more. The invention of the wheel removed a huge burden from human’s backs. We moved faster. It let us travel. Especially it lets us travel with information.
It is possible if humans did not invent wheels before inventing literature and other stuff, the information would have not moved at the pace it happened and the cultures would have died without passing it on to the other cultures to remember.
The wheel seems to be the one of the first important inventions. But it is possible that the inventions prior to that never traveled anywhere to be backed up!
If Egyptians possessed proper wheel technology, they would have traveled and remembered their culture and why they built pyramids.
Can the problem-solvers find a purpose for billions of people?
It is good that we as human beings are moving more and more towards intellectually loaded things to perform every day as opposed to physically. The Kardashev Scale tells us we have a huge area to cover in terms of technology and authority over the universe. Maybe space exploration gives purpose to everyone else?
Can we send robots with seeds to mars to do vegetation before we ever leave earth? That seems to be a better option if the robots can. So, it seems we don’t have to necessarily leave earth to rule over other planets.
Going to mars in person to make it habitable is like going to office in person to work. It is so pre-covid.
Why do people need a job?
People are talking about the Universal Basic Income to tackle this efficiency problem. But,
Why do people need money?
Imagine a civilization where food, shelter, commute, and internet are provided for free. It would cost $76.7B to feed the whole world. Averaging $10 per day per person.
But, why should food cost money? Why should electricity cost money?
There is no doubt that our civilization is founded on coal and oil. But, If humans resist our greed and improve ourselves to really invent self sustaining fusion reactors and such things that makes power free, things can drastically change forever. How far are we? There is a saying, Fushion reactors are always 30 years away.
- Desalination is such an energy-hungry operation that stops us from using our oceans for food generation.
- Cost of commute takes the majority of the food’s cost. It gets cut down when ships and vehicles run for free.
- We human beings have already mastered the skill of how to cut down manpower to achieve something. By the time, we achieve fusion reactor or equivalent, the AI’s would have grown much more intelligent. We would not need the salaried personnel.
It will boil down to natural resources.
- Building houses can be made almost free with a huge 3D printer. But we need that material to build.
- Electronics items can be made almost free but we need the raw materials.
The excavation can be made free but not the natural resources themselves.
Coming out of the utopian dreams
The above things may sound ludicrous. But, what rank do we have in tapping the energy from atoms in our priority list? What percentage of human beings are working on that? If we can achieve this impossible feat of no-to-low cost electricity, the basic necessities of human beings can be made free and hence we can even remove the need for jobs and Universal Basic Income.
When we remove the needs for jobs from people. People will get more time to think and explore the impossibles. And that could be the most powerful thing a civilisation can achieve.
If a million minds care to think about the time warp a fictional way of space travel, the probability of the few stumbling upon breakthroughs and even some solutions goes higher.
Not every scientist working on these problems chose to work on those problems. Many may have happened to be there.
What about the purpose without jobs?
The person with enormous options to do in life is a wealthy person. Obviously, the rich people today have enormous options to pursue. That luxury will be made available to everyone.
- As digital wellness is rising, Not everyone wants to watch TikTok all day every day, and die.
- We will see a lot of open source organizations working towards solving something.
- We will innovate faster. We will grow powerful in the Kardashev scale faster.
One thing for sure is that provided the number of things to pursue, people can not get bored. If everyone had given time to write, Shakespear would have occupied the 90th percentile. The average popular writers would have gotten 50th percentile. They are at the top because the remaining were busy working for food. Breaking this limitation will result in the creation of a huge number of great minds.
