The first time I heard the term “superfluous people” was when reading the 19th-century Russian writers Alexander Pushkin and Ivan Turgenev. In their stories, mollycoddled, world-weary layabouts from the minor nobility would chase women, gamble away their inheritance and shoot each other in duels.
Like the “fifth wheel on a cart,” as Turgenev described them, they could find little purpose in life and their real-life counterparts would later be sucked into radical causes. Such elite overproduction is sometimes blamed for fuelling the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.
The second time I heard the term “superfluous people” was in a more recent, and chilling, conversation with a West Coast venture capitalist. Only this time it was in connection with the artificial intelligence revolution. His view was that machines would soon be able to do almost all the jobs humans currently do, rendering a lot of us superfluous.