Profession by Isaac Asimov

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It's a very 1950s story. Everything is very organized. Many stories about that period were about organization, good or bad. This came from WWII, especially the European theater. Heroic mode had failed at Dunkirk and Dieppe. For the next round, D-Day, things were more organized. Way more organized. General Eisenhower came from logistics. He delayed D-Day a year while the Allies got ready. Really ready. Overwhelmingly ready. Huge numbers of special landing ships. Mobile instant ports. Giant spools of pipe…

Nightfall is widely considered to be his best work (and with justification) but Profession stuck with me the first time I read it. When I first read it in my teens I saw it as a comment on education - a system that churned out little robots to feed the economic machine with robot workers. Later in life, with more life experience I've come to understand it as both the rarity of creators, and of the need to create. You…

and only a few millions a year out of Earth’s eight billion population When Asimov wrote that, a population of eight billion some time in the future was unbelievably huge. Now, it's still unbelievably huge, but all those people exist. Too many people for the Earth to sustainably keep.