For some reason the search page doesn’t work for me so if this has been done before apologies…
Apart from the more lucrative sports and the entertainment business, is there really any practical application for the small percentage of humans who can perform extreme feats of strength, balance, mental calculations, or who posess extremely sensitive hearing/sight/ etc?
We see these feats put on exhibition regularly (hence my reference to the entertainment business), but can people who are capable of solving complex mathematics problems in their heads, or spotting the differences in 2 almost identical pictures extremely quickly make a career of such abilities? We seem to have develloped machines and computers that can out-perform us in most if not all tasks, so are extraordinary abilities really all that useful in modern develloped countries?
I’m not talking about such traits coming in handy now and then… but in terms of either monetizing such abilities or their bringing a measurably higher quality of life to those who posses them.
It depends on what you mean by “complicated math problems”. Anyone working in a STEM field will get to be pretty good at mental math, for instance, for the simple reason that it’s usually quicker than a calculator.
If a profession requires solving math problems, then I’m sure that being able to do it fast without having to input stuff into a device or write on paper is a benefit. If you work in construction and can balance really well, it may prove to be a benefit to that line of work. If you work in security, having a good ability to spot things that you need to be looking for, again, may be a benefit.
My brother once described that, running a kitchen, he could keep all the incoming tickets in his head at once, plus all the ones that were already underway, and knew the dishes and workers well enough that rather than calling out orders as soon as the ticket came in, and letting the cooks figure out the timing themselves, he’d call out individual dishes to individual cooks as they needed to start cooking it. This is probably a good ability to have to guarantee that the kitchen is running at peak efficiency to get everything done at once in a minimum amount of time, without having to be dependent on all members of the kitchen having perfect timing. But, it could also be said to create a kitchen which is dependent on someone with particular, rare abilities as the instant he leaves, the quality of the kitchen could drop precipitously if the people in the kitchen weren’t up to snuff and simply had that being covered by my brother’s skill.
Most jobs in the world aren’t one of a kind. The job specifications are pre-defined by what’s reasonable to find among the general population at a rate sufficient to fill the need. Some people will be better than the minimum necessary, but fundamentally their role is simply to accomplish what the job demands. Someone with extreme abilities could create new roles with more specific job descriptions. But if that’s not reasonable to find replacements, then it’s not a role that can exist in the real world long-term. It will end up getting divided out among the other workers, split into multiple roles, etc. So whether it’s actually of value to let someone with abilities beyond what most can accomplish in the same job is a bit questionable.
Extreme physical and mental durability is helpful in military special forces where people face constant and multiple forms of concurrent physical and mental stress. During the process of trying out for those teams they heap as much physical and mental stress on candidates as they can to see who can hack it.
The linguistic ability required to be a simultaneous interpreter may not quite reach “superpower,” but it’s something computers are a long way from doing, and it’s something not every person who knows two languages fluently can do. Most bilingual people can manage sequential interpreting, but simultaneous interpreting is entirely different. I know, because sign language interpreters are expected always to be simultaneous interpreters-- there are lots of situations where the physical set-up for simultaneous oral interpreters doesn’t exist, and it usually happens only at, say, the UN in NYC, or the Hague, or military bases with lots of multinational training. But there’s plenty of oral interpreting that is sequential because you don’t have the speaker/headphone setup for simultaneous interpreting.
So, first you need someone genuinely fluent, not just conversant, in two languages, then you need them trained and able to do simultaneous interpreting, which means taking in a language, and outputting one at the same time, with about a 3-5 word lag. Just try sometime listening to a TV show and repeating every idea that is said, but not verbatim-- paraphrasing, without leaving out anything. That’s actually an exercise early in training for simultaneous interpreters.
Even the best ones usually need to be spelled every 30 minutes or so, if they are going to continue for a 6-8 hour day. Sometimes jobs that last an hour and that’s all you do for the day you can manage.
Anyway, the paraphrasing without repeating verbatim can be a sort of parlour trick-- I’ve done it for like ten minute stretches and amazed people, because no one else in the group can do it for more than a minute or so, especially for something like a TV show with multiple speakers.
Perfume makers and food companies employ people with extremely sharp senses of smell (and taste, for the food companies), who can identify differences that nobody else can.
I would wager that people with fantastic balance do well working high steel. There was a season or two of Survivor featuring a player named Boston Rob who worked high steel; one of the challenges involved negotiating his way across a turning balance beam. Some people went across it on hands and knees; others walked slowly. He ran. So, that’d be a pretty useful skill 30 stories up on an I-beam.
There’s people who work recognizing people’s faces. They work in locations such as casinos, keeping out former clients. They need to be able to recognize someone despite changes in hair, coloring, clothes… At first, it doesn’t sound particularly impressive to those of us who aren’t face-blind, but many of us have first hand experience of not being recognized due to something as simple as changing our glasses (yes: the Clark Kent effect actually works).