Absolutely loads. Like, you can't imagine. You might start to try imagining but then you'd end up failing to imagine because there are so many people that… you just can’t possibly imagine it. More people have existed than do exist now, and they mostly had a pretty terrible time because a lot of it was in the deep dark past, before they invented compilation videos of dogs and Tikka Masala.
It’s impossible to truly grasp the scale of the billions of existences throughout time- to pluck a tiny example, when someone says “industrial revolution” you aren’t picturing three guys round a steam engine. It took a lot of workhouse workers per workhouse to do the work of the whole workhouse(s). Multiplied by a lot.
Think of a random, simple modern pleasure, like going for a swim. Pools and lidos get millions of visitors every year - families and exercisers, the majority of whom you don’t know. Millions of people that you’ve never heard of, yet they’ve existed the whole time. With lives, families, whatnot and… whatnot. How many iterations did the swimming pool go through, for how many generations with huge volumes of human ingenuity spent for centuries, as the concept of recreational water has evolved from a warm basin to extreme water park jungle adventure?
Don’t even get me started on the infinity pool.
The amount of human effort-hours that went into the development of each tiiiiny slice of our possible standard life experiences is beyond mine or your full comprehension(s). Multiply that lack of comprehensions by all other interests, activities, advances in science, the systems that direct electricity, water and internet to your home, the food supply chain, every service, utility or facility you have ever relied on, and you have added up quite a few people overall.
You’ll understand then, in all that vastness of thought, when we can’t predict what the human race will do next.
Polls - and especially political ones - seem utterly useless. You asked 2000 people? You asked 20,000 people? Same difference, because both times you missed essentially everyone. Not only that, but you tried to put each of them into one of a small selection of boxes, and then expected some form of accuracy - you can’t have accuracy with this many people around.
We’ve seen a repeated failure to crunch the beliefs of a population into conveniently consumable categories because people will lie, or behave differently than their vocalised beliefs, or even sometimes - in very rare situations - tell the truth, and that can mess you up more. Blindsided by elections and a plethora of thorny issues including ones that rhyme with “schmexit”, “schmump” and “schmeform UK” (tenuous is my middle name), we can no longer expect to know what people really think of any given Thing. We don’t all want the same small selections of Thing. Some may want 99% of Thing really, in their heart of hearts, but will be swayed by 0.01% of promises from Other Thing, or Other Thing 2: Now That’s What I Call A Thing.
Such knowledge can be devastating, but this piece isn’t meant to give you thoughts you can feel worthless in - quite the opposite. Your actions in all walks of life can have effects on giving space to others; and there’s plenty of space to go around! Knowing there will always be someone who doesn’t fit in a specific box is a strength, and reframing your mental model of the vastness of what and who you can’t see, can help you from falling into traps of blanket generalisation which can be so deliciously tempting so deliciously frequently.
A delicious blanket.
There are indeed So Many People, but you’re one of them as well. You’re unpredictable and you don’t fit into prescribed boxes. You’re a marketer’s nightmare; a pollster’s phantasm. That’s power you can use next time somebody tries putting you or others in a metaphorical box (we cannot guarantee protection against literal boxes, always check the small print).
A “slice of humanity” you may look at, has just as much variation, likes and dislikes etc as anyone in your social circles, versus yourself - and in some cases multiplied many times. This is why I hate all generalised statements (irony intended). It’s also how technology that tries to categorise people will be largely clutching at straws, and in some cases can be downright offensive depending on the life events that may have been experienced by the person who receives your ignorantly-fired email.
“Hey, it’s Mother’s Day soon! Oh, but click here to opt out if your mum’s not alive, we’re really sorry about that!”. I don’t click there to opt out, I just unsubscribe. Enjoy your money-spinning celebration of Commercialism, though.
The very worst and laziest, of course, is getting a Large Language Model to determine the box that best fits me. I can tell they’ve done it; it lacks character and class in the most obvious of ways. They won’t have spent the money on a “premium one” either, it’ll be the most-output-tokens-per-buck model that was sold to them by a company who didn’t realise how many people there are in the world; how many potential customers that model might end up talking to, and frankly embarrass itself in front of.
If there is a picture of a human on a website next to a button that says “chat”, and I click that button only to be presented with 3 or 4 basic options that are essentially links to your existing FAQ pages, there is a non-zero chance that I will type a swear word in as soon as I’m given control of the text box. That’s not a chat, nor is it AI. It’s just the latest form of automated telephone systems which, as you’ll recall, everybody loves.
Everybody smiles, don’t they? Ear to ear, as they’re crammed into the nearest-fitting option on the automated system. They delight in it. Children dance, and buzzards sing.
Press 1 if you’re a crustacean.
Press 2 if you love oranges.
Press 3 to speak to a merman.
For all other enquiries please mash the keypad with your forehead.
“Bleep bloop, I didn’t quite catch that.”
So let’s bring people out of the boxes in our heads, and delete the boxes with both haste and vigour. Assume anything about anyone at your peril; there’s more of them and more variants of their interests than you could conceive in a lifetime of conceiving - and if you help make it, there’s room for everyone.