Profession and Wallerstein offer opposing visions of how societies organize knowledge and creativity—one mechanized and hierarchical, the other hopeful that systems can still nurture human curiosity.
George went a sallow yellow. His eyes bulged. “There’s something wrong with my mind…”
“Every once in a while, George, we come up against a young man whose mind is not suited to receiving superimposed knowledge of any sort.”
“‘You mean I can’t be educated?”
“That is what I mean.”
“But that’s crazy. I’m intelligent. I can understand—” He looked helplessly about as though trying to find some way of proving that he had a functioning brain.
In Profession (1957), Isaac Asimov presents us with a future where an unnamed interplanetary government controls the galaxy. Earth is little more than a breeding and training ground; the Outer Worlds form the true centers of civilization, and no one remains on Earth unless they are given no other option. As with our own world, the most important resource is labor. But this society has established a seamless system for the proper distribution of labor.
Before turning to the plot, a touch of context clarifies the world from which Asimov was writing. Profession appeared in the year of Sputnik amid US anxieties about standardized education, technocracy, and a looming space race. This story channels a mid‑century worry: will efficiency crush curiosity, or can systems be designed to serve it?
What follows puts Asimov’s tale in conversation with Immanuel Wallerstein’s world‑systems analysis. In juxtaposing them, we can see how a mid‑century technocratic imagination and a 1970s political‑economy lens illuminate each other and our present. Reading them together offers a way to see the promise and peril of stratified knowledge systems, from artificial intelligence (AI) driven education to globalized research economies, which underscores a central claim: creativity can be either hoarded or cultivated for broad flourishing.
The Plight of George Platten
In Profession, eight-year-old children are herded to community centers around the world and receive their first implantation, mechanically bequeathing the knowledge of reading. Ten years later, those same children return to community centers for Education Day. On this day, machines test their brains, determine what profession they are neurologically suited for, and imprint the corresponding knowledge. Success on Education Day means instant mastery and automatic placement into society, usually with a ticket off Earth to an Outer World. Every ten years, Earth hosts the Olympics, where offworlders return to compete for planetary and personal prestige.
George Platten does not fit into this system. For one thing, George attempts to educate himself before Education Day. When he tells the doctor who is administering his implantation that he has been reading a book, the doctor is flummoxed. Embarrassed, George recedes into himself, professing that he meant no wrong. “Who said anything about wrong?” the doctor responds. “Useless is what I would say.”
When it comes time for George’s evaluation on Education Day, to his shock, the machines evaluate him as “uneducatable.” He is taken down a hallway of hundreds of holding rooms, each labeled for a particular profession: Construction Engineers, Agronomists, Statisticians. George is not placed in any of these. He is placed in an empty room and told that he has become a ward of the planet. The planet will take care of him the rest of his life, “about the way … he himself would be to a sick kitten he had taken pity on.” He has been relegated to life in The House for the Feeble‑Minded.
This is the pivot where Asimov’s fiction begins to echo a much broader social map: a world sorted by function, with mobility tightly managed. To see that structure more clearly, step out of the story and into a system‑level lens.
Core, Semi‑Periphery, and Periphery
In his seminal 1974 book, The Modern World‑System, Vol. I, neo‑Marxist economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein, first outlined his world‑systems theory, which begins with the argument that the modern age should not be understood in terms of separate national histories but as a single world economy. This capitalist world‑system was built around a division of labor that linked regions into one interdependent structure. The rise of long‑distance trade, colonial expansion, and capitalist agriculture created a system where economic roles are unequally distributed and where wealth flows in patterned directions across political boundaries.
Within this system, Wallerstein identified three positions: Core, Semi‑Periphery, and Periphery. Core regions, such as Northwestern Europe, consolidated strong states and advanced economies, controlling high‑profit industries, trade routes, and military power. Peripheries, like Eastern Europe and the Americas, supplied raw materials, cheap labor, and agricultural goods under exploitative terms of trade. Semi‑Peripheral regions occupied an intermediate position, stabilizing the system by preventing a simple binary of rich and poor regions, allowing mobility and buffering tensions. Rather than viewing development and underdevelopment as separate trajectories, Wallerstein shows they are two sides of the same process: the development of one region occurs through the underdevelopment of another.
A touch of context likewise helps here. Wallerstein was writing amid decolonization, the fallout from the 1973 oil shock, and debates over dependency theory. He sought a longue‑durée map of capitalism that could explain why technology and profits concentrate in certain places. In his view, by virtue of its dominant position, the Core historically monopolizes the infrastructure for creativity: universities, research labs, and high‑tech industries. The Periphery and Semi‑Periphery may occasionally contribute to innovation, but such creativity is inevitably co‑opted by the Core.
As with all good socioeconomic theories, Wallerstein has his fair share of critics. But at least one part of world‑systems theory appears to ring true: mechanical creativity and technological innovation tend to be assets of the Core far more than of the Periphery. If the world‑system sorts and channels creativity, Asimov’s plot gives us a human face for the process. Let’s return to George and see how selection—not implantation—becomes destiny.
Curious George
George’s time in The House of the Feeble‑Minded is an endless malaise. His roommate, Omani, halfheartedly attempts to convince George to try to educate himself to keep him entertained. But George, who was taught from birth that learning is passive, mechanical, and implanted, struggles to see the point. Unwilling to accept his plight, George resolves to escape.
He leaves The House of the Feeble‑Minded to watch the Olympics. When he is stopped by the police, a gray‑haired man gets him out of trouble and whisks him away. The man, a Social Scientist, tells George he wishes to study him as a social anomaly. En route, the man teaches George the virtues of history and social science:
“The past explains the present. For instance, why is our Educational system what it is?” the man asks. “Because it’s best,” George replies snappishly. “Ah, but why is it best?” the man continues before explaining to George that there was a time before implanted Education, a time before interstellar travel, a time before the world government. And he explains that all of these had to be created.
After a few misadventures, George is returned to The House of the Feeble‑Minded. He awakens to find Omani, who quickly makes it apparent that George is unique, but not in the way he thought. He is told that on Reading Day, one in ten thousand people is marked as having the capacity for creative thought. After further selection, only 0.001 percent of the population is creative enough to be inducted into The Institute of Higher Studies. Still somewhat confused, George questions why the system for selecting out the creatives is so opaque.
Omani replies: “There are ten thousand men like you, George, who support the advancing of fifteen hundred worlds. We can’t allow ourselves to miss one recruit to that number or waste our efforts on one member who doesn’t measure up.”
Here, Asimov’s twist makes Wallerstein’s abstraction vivid: a tiny “core” of creative labor organizes the knowledge economy while the majority, assigned roles by implantation, supply stable reproduction of the system.
Creativity for the Many, Not the Few
Our world, the real world, now sits on the cusp of transformation. Advances in rocketry and physics are taking us further into the cosmos and making such sojourns cheaper and easier every year. The advent of general‑purpose AI is changing the way we view education and knowledge. If it is not already upon us, cutting‑edge research in quantum computing, biotechnology, and robotics promises to thrust humanity into a new golden age.
Many of these innovations are present in the imagination of Asimov. But Asimov consistently infuses in his work a sense of positive humanism. Whether in the Foundation series, I, Robot, or his lesser‑known works, Asimov expresses an unfailing belief that humanity is special. Profession is no different.
Though the world laid out in Profession is mechanical, and average individuals (about whom we learn little) appear as cogs in a machine, humanity as a whole retains its creativity. Humanity has not cast out its better angels; it has, instead, constructed a society where those angels can lead humanity to flourishing.
Put into the context of Wallerstein’s world‑system, George becomes a member of the Core, a member of that segment of interstellar society that has the capacity for creativity and innovation. The Periphery and Semi‑Periphery of the various planets, which provide raw materials and labor to the core and form the backbone of industry, are, ultimately, dominated by the Core. But, counter to Wallerstein’s pessimistic view of modern capitalism and the exploitation of the Peripheries, Profession presents an optimistic vision.
The metallurgists, accountants, laborers, and other members of Asimov’s depicted society appear content. Their physical needs are met, they face no threats to their security, and they have strong familial and community bonds. In Profession, socioeconomic mobility—a focal point for Wallerstein—is only a matter of prestige, not a determining factor in one’s quality of life.
Rethinking the System
In this way, Profession complicates Wallerstein’s schema. Where Wallerstein emphasizes structural inequality, exploitation, and the way creativity is captured by the Core, Asimov imagines a society where inequality is transformed into stability and even contentment. The majority may not innovate, but neither are they oppressed or impoverished. Their lives have meaning, security, and dignity. Creativity remains rare, but it is not hoarded; it is cultivated as a social good, protected and nurtured for the benefit of all. In that sense, Asimov’s tale is less an allegory of capitalist hierarchy than a utopian vision of how a society might balance efficiency, dignity, and the necessity of innovation.
Seen from our vantage point, Asimov’s optimism is striking. In a world that often mirrors Wallerstein’s darker analysis—where we hear much about wealth gaps, exploitation of cheap labor, and irresponsible extraction of resources—Professionoffers a counternarrative. It suggests that even within highly mechanized and stratified systems, human curiosity and originality cannot be extinguished. More than that, it insists that such creativity can lift not just the few but the many. The story leaves us with a challenge: build institutions that do not smother curiosity but cultivate it, ensuring that the spark of creative genius can illuminate a path for all of humanity.
About the Author: Luke Hogg
Luke Hogg is director of technology policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, where he focuses on the intersection of technological innovation and public policy. Before joining FAI, Luke was federal affairs manager at FreedomWorks, where he concentrated on blockchain, internet governance, and regulatory issues. He holds a BA in Government and Data Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Washington, DC.
Image: BAGOSTOCK/shutterstock
