Surplus intellectual capacity

January 22,2022

When I was around 13 or 14 I used to have this wild vision of the world, where everybody was optimising for the betterment of humanity and not “wasting” their brains on useless stuff like movie gossips and whatnots. My (idiot) reasoning at the time was that, if only people around me wouldn’t bring in non-utilitarian information to me, I would be able to do “much” more. But in reality it was only my younger self, justifying being lazy and not actively doing stuff and just simply complaining everything around.

Half a decade later, I started thinking that maybe I should gently nudge people into doing stuff, By setting an example myself. At those times, the quote “Be the change you want to see in the world”. Kinda resonated with me strongly. I would try to involve people into stuff I’m doing. Which has it’s own problem where, people who were invited into my projects would only have half the interest I would have, and people whom they invite would only have half the interest of that and so on. Also, as soon as I let the yoke to my “confidantes” they would either demolish the whole thing and I would have to start from scratch or not do anything at all until I returned at which point you might as well have no help from them. Adding people to your projects has the added complexity where your level of motivation starts mirroring the people you are hanging around with. This is useful in one dimension while also being negative in another. Keeping it in the positive end is hard.

But, I still haven’t stopped involving people in my projects or into utilitarian talks.

More recently I’ve been realising that most people just don’t want to be or need to be utilitarian. There is just no need for people to work on something outside of work. Scrolling through endless Social media feeds is completely enough for them. I think there are more and more people getting into that bucket. Which, seems obvious when we look at the facebook MAU or any social media for that matter. I used to panic and go into rants on why this is a net negative for society and how the time could actually be spent on something more “productive”.

But, that is not necessarily true. And the future might slightly be more optimistic than that. Any given society has Z amount of intellectual capacity which could be roughly equated to the total number of hours people are active times the total number of people in said society. Now the society could accomodate the Z amount of capacity into multiple small pockets of work for the betterment of society. For example, that is where we have arrived at the 8 hours work day from the 10 hrs one we had previously. We now have more people and more automation, which means people can now have more time in their hands, instead of “working”. I like to think of the graph like this,

There is an argument to be made for the “new jobs are being created” thing. The new jobs that are being created are not exponentially more or even equivalent to the number of jobs automation/industrialisation is taking away. But it is creating a solid amount of wealth. Which then could be distributed to everyone. this is where the UBI solution starts feeling solid. With so much automation + so many people in the workforce there seems only one way to go 4 day work week. These are all mechanisms where we are trying to allocate the excess intellectual capacity to use. There is just not enough work for so many people to do due to automation and population. And that is good, it is sign of a healthy society progressing towards 0 work day.

What are people supposed to do with so much free time in their hands? My argument was to make use of it to be “productive”. But in the current scenario where our society is going, it’s not necessarily true. We are in no need for people to be so productive. And it is completely fine if the “excess capacity” is being used on following Kylie and kim or scrolling their weekend away. Everything is fine, as long it is non harmful to others.

What does this mean to me personally? Do I just start following the same route as well?

Well, no. This is just an observation on how things are and how it could be progressing. I strongly believe that groupthink can harm individuals. And won’t be falling into that bucket for a long time.

update 09/07/2024

Reading again, I seem to have definitely used the word “utilitarian” very liberally. Now that I’m a little wiser, I think existing within society and being a consumer is a form of productive utilitarianism. You need not do anything more than earn money and spend it on something. If some entity is ready to pay for your services it shows that the market values your time and effort. And you are contributing to the society by being a consumer.

last update: 2024-09-06