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There is no doubt that we have come to the end of an iconic era that has seen huge exponential growth in entrepreneurship.
Since the dot-com boom of the millennium, the success of TV shows like Shark tank, The ApprenticeAnd The Dragon’s Den (on which I appeared) have inspired an army of hungry, aspiring people who have immersed themselves in the high-risk, opportunistic, exciting, stressful yet independent world of entrepreneurship.
With more than 500 million entrepreneurs and 150 million startups worldwide, we live in a time where independent businesses and entrepreneurship have experienced unprecedented rise and development.
I remember a time in my childhood when most people couldn’t spell the word “entrepreneur.” As a teenager, I would describe myself as one. Even though it sounded 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 grandma and my niece are all proud entrepreneurs. Regardless of a person’s age or demographic, with the advent of technology, barriers to entry have dropped significantly and entrepreneurship has seen a lot of hype and become the buzzword of the century.
But will that change with the rise of AI?
The human cost of too much comfort
In my day, being an entrepreneur meant working very hard, often harder than everyone else around you. The early bird catches the worm. Go to sleep late, get up early. Never take your eyes off the ball. These were the guiding principles of my time. Passion, determination and resilience were the only things that could guarantee success in any given climate.
These days, being an entrepreneur seems as easy as twiddling your thumbs and clicking (or swiping) a few buttons on an app on a smartphone. Hard work? Unlikely! Just click on the right settings or prompts and “Voila!” Let the machine do the hard work!
Humans were born with the anatomy and body structure to be hunters, gatherers, lumberjacks, climbers and runners. We were lucky to be physically active and mobile. Unfortunately, humanity has just completed a century of turning these mannerisms into desk-bound, complacent recluses.
This alone will bring about seismic changes for humanity in the decades and centuries to come.
Yes, AI can write a dissertation for you and order your concert tickets. Machines will undoubtedly make life more comfortable, reduce time wastage and increase efficiency, but what will they do to our bodies, our minds and our psyche? Our determination and cognitive abilities must be challenged daily with complex physical and mental tasks to counteract aging and dementia.
Even the most basic tasks in our lives, such as driving from one place to another, are left to machines to handle. As we all know, if 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 cognitive development and development of our minds and psyches.
Can we be independent freethinkers when technology drives so much of decision-making?
What does it mean to be an entrepreneur today?
Is someone really an entrepreneur if they just click a button and the rest is automated? What if they built the hardware, software and automation themselves? Then in my eyes it is clearly entrepreneurial. But if someone else develops the machine and uses it, is he really an entrepreneur?
Having produced and directed many television shows that positively highlight and showcase advanced technologies and innovations, I am clearly optimistic about our technologically charged future. But let’s be honest with ourselves: while machines, automation, robots and computers give us certain abilities, they take away many natural human functions that are fundamental to a person’s cognitive abilities and needs.
Overuse of technology significantly damages the brain systems that link emotional processing, attention and decision-making, according to a new study. The findings link technology overload to anxiety, severe depression and suicide.
People worry that robots will take over or take over our jobs, but I worry that advanced technologies will make people more disadvantaged, lazier, dumber, and unhealthier in general.
As Garry Kasparov, the first chess master to lose to a machine, once said, “We need better people, not less technology.”
Where is true entrepreneurship if everything is automated and lies with the founders of these technologies?
Humans are extremely adaptable and innovative, and we will adapt to the heavy integration of technology and machines into our world. However, it is vital that we stay ahead of the machines, stay informed and always commit to the hard work.
The key to a sustainable and successful future is to ensure that we work synergistically and synchronize with machines, nurture our natural abilities, refine our strengths, train our bodies and minds, and not settle for external technological capabilities and resources .
Thomas Edison’s formula “Genius is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration” still applies today. Even if perhaps 90 percent of manual work is ultimately done by machines, that doesn’t mean we can rest on just 10 percent inspiration.