I find Musk and Bezos’ comment that the human population should be a billion so that there are “thousands of Mozarts and Einsteins” bizarre. I just don’t get the mindset that leads to that. The focus on individuals just doesn’t correspond to how things happen. I also see no evidence that we have a lack of composers or scientists. There’s plenty of good music, and scientific research seems to be proceeding at a reasonable pace.
@janef0421 I don't think it's focusing on individuals since they are talking about thousands.
But anyway, as a person working in science, there are an awful lot of problems that we could be addressing with more eyes, with better eyes even.
There are a lot of questions that we have about reality, and only so many hours in the day to try to figure them out.
More hands would help us resolve some of our practical questions, or even just better hands.
Some more Einsteins would be nice.
@volkris They’re discussing thousands of people out of a trillion, which is still quite individual. You might be right about scientists, I’m not too familiar with the field. That being said, it seems much more efficient to reallocate labour from other areas. A lot of labour is unnecessary, either because the production is unnecessary or the work isn’t needed for production. That would be much more environmentally sound.
@janef0421 I don't think it's that simple, I think (and now I'm going to talk about individuals) we tend to have different talents and different interests.
The guy who is really interested in playing football and being athletic might not be so eager to be reassigned to sit at a desk and work on engineering schematics. And vice versa.
And even if they were interested, they might not be good at it.
Some people are really good at math and some people are much better making art.
So I just don't think it's so easy to move people around like that. People in general just aren't so easy to pop into different jobs like identical cogs in the machine.
@volkris People have interests and competencies, but I don’t think those currently pose a limit to scientific research. There are many people doing unnecessary labour in fields similar to scientific research; For instance, many financial and marketing analysts primarily do data analysis and modelling tasks similar to those used in various branches of science. Also, our labour market is not presently oriented to individual interests and competencies, so it wouldn’t be any worse.