Do games like Factorio or Eve Online sap the intellectual potential of humanity?
The current economic system prevents virtually everyone in the system other than a few at the top of the pyramid from achieving their potential.<p>How much extra money will the people at the top centrally controlling everything make if, for example, your plumber is a more intellectually well rounded individual?  Possibly a negative amount of money.  So the plumber plays modded minecraft.<p>Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics.  If political demographic membership is more important than programming skill, such that a skilled programmer cannot be hired, that person should grind survival rations at walmart and play factorio for recreation.<p>There&#x27;s the optimistic view that maximizing intellectual potential means curing cancer and living on mars.  But the people currently at the top make a lot of money off cancer, and won&#x27;t make any money off mars, but we do know &quot;The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.&quot; so in that pessimistic sense I&#x27;m glad our propaganda driven prison is not as optimized as it could be.  Unleashing autonomous walking AI robots to randomly kill people in the middle east to make oil cheaper would require amazing intellectual potential but is a negative outcome, and frankly it would make the people in charge a lot more money than positive stuff like curing cancer.<p>People are already educated beyond the economies means to employ them.  Having them pretend to work while remaining unable to employ them sounds like too much of a free lunch.  Who benefits, follow the money, it won&#x27;t be us.  We already have too much intelligence and education to apply to our current economy, making even more structural underemployment isn&#x27;t going to help.  If under the current system there&#x27;s 20 postdocs living in poverty trying to apply for that one paying job to cure cancer, creating a &quot;fairer&quot; system where 2000 people intellectually capable of being postdocs all living in poverty applying to that one paying job to cure cancer isn&#x27;t going to provide statistically better results for the cancer curing program although it will make 1980 people highly dis-satisfied with life.  Is it worth making 1980 people suffer if the overall program isn&#x27;t more successful?  Even if the program is more successful, which I find unlikely, how much torture of how many people is acceptable in exchange?