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There is no doubt that we are nearing the end of an iconic era that has seen the great exponential growth of entrepreneurship.
Since the dotcom boom of the millennium, the success of TV shows like Shark tank, learnerAND Dragon's Warehouse (in which I have appeared), have nurtured an army of hungry, aspiring people who have immersed themselves in the risk-laden, opportunistic, exciting, stressful, yet independent world of the entrepreneur.
With more than 500 million entrepreneurs AND 150 million startups worldwide, we are in a time that has witnessed the unprecedented growth and evolution of business and independent enterprise.
There was a time I remember growing up where most people couldn't spell the word entrepreneur. When I was a teenager, I described myself as such. Although it looked exotic and cool, most people at the time didn't understand what I was doing or the value of it.
But today, my aunt, my cousin, my grandmother and my niece are all proud entrepreneurs. Regardless of a person's age or demographics, the barrier to entry has fallen significantly as technology has grown and entrepreneurship has seen a huge boom, becoming the buzzword of the century.
But will everything change with the rise of AI?
The human cost of too much comfort
In my day, being an entrepreneur meant that a person had to work hard, often harder than anyone around them. The early bird gets the worm. Go to bed late, get up early. Never take your eye off the ball. These were the key phrases of my time. Passion, determination and endurance were the only things that could ensure success in any given climate.
Today, being an entrepreneur seems to be as easy as twiddling your thumb and clicking (or swiping) a few buttons on an app on a smartphone. Hard work? Not likely! Just click the appropriate settings or requirements and 'Voila!' Let the machine do the hard work!
Humans are born with the anatomy and physique to be hunters, gatherers, lumberjacks, climbers, and runners. We were blessed to be physically active and agile. Unfortunately, the human race has just spent an entire century of changing these behaviors, becoming complacent delivery service hermits.
This, in itself, will have seismic changes for humanity for decades and centuries to come.
Yes HE can write a dissertation for you and order your concert tickets. Cars will undoubtedly make life more convenient, cut wasted time and increase efficiency, but what will they do to our bodies, minds and psyches? Our determination and cognitive ability must be challenged with complex physical and mental tasks every day in order to fight aging and dementia.
Even with the most basic tasks in our lives, such as driving from one place to another, we leave it to machines to handle it. As we all know when the GPS signal is lost, without knowing the routes in our brain, we are lost. This does not work well both in emergencies and for the cognition and evolution of our mind and psyche.
Can we be free independent thinkers when technology is leading so much of decision making?
What does it mean to be an entrepreneur today?
Is a person really an entrepreneur when all they did was click a button and the rest of it was automated? If they built the hardware, software and automation themselves? Then in my eyes, it is clearly entrepreneurial. But if someone else created the machine and they used it, are they really an entrepreneur?
Having produced and directed many television shows that positively explore and showcase advanced technology and innovation, I am clearly positive about our technologically overloaded future. But let's be honest with ourselves, machines, automation, robots and computers, while giving us some skills, take away many natural human functions that are essential to the cognitive abilities and needs of a human being.
According to a new STUDY, excessive technology use severely damages the brain systems that link emotional processing, attention, and decision-making. Findings link technology overload to anxiety, severe depression and suicide.
People worry about robots taking our jobs or taking them over completely, but I worry that humans in general are becoming disadvantaged, lazier, fatter and unhealthier as a result of advanced technologies.
Like Garry Kasparov, the first chess champion to ever lose to a machine said “We need better people, not less technology”
Where does true entrepreneurship stand when everything becomes automated and depends on the founders of those technologies?
Humans are very adaptive and innovative and we will adapt to the sharp integration of technology and machines in our world, but it is essential to stay one step ahead of the machines, keeping the knowledge and always growing to do the hard work.
The key to a sustainable and successful future is to ensure that we synergize and synchronize with machines, and nurture our natural abilities, improve our strengths, exercise our bodies and minds, and not become complacent with our capabilities and resources. technological externality.
Thomas EdisonThe formula “Genius is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration” is still true today. Although machines may end up doing 90 percent of the manual work, that doesn't mean we can rely on only 10 percent inspiration.