Why Choose Entrepreneurship?
May 11, 1997. The best chess player in the world was no longer a human. Deep Blue, a chess computer made by IBM, beat Garry Kasparov, the reigning world champion, in a six-game chess match. To this day, machines are consistently able to beat some of the top performers in the chess scene.
Some thought that chess was just an elaborate mathematical exercise, which machines are good at; surely a computer wouldn’t be able to understand actual complex problems such as human language?
On January 14, 2011, IBM Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the most decorated Jeopardy players of all time at their own game. Today Watson’s query response abilities serve as tools to assist operation in certain medical fields and is slowly becoming more and more widespread along with similar but less powerful systems such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
People thought that as hardware improved, a bunch of brute force pattern matching was all that was needed for computers to comprehend more complex tasks like language response. There must be problems with just too many permutations for computers to possibly ever calculate, right?
In March of 2016, one of the classic examples of a mathematically mind-boggling game, Go, was conquered by a computer. Google’s AlphaGo triumphed over Lee Sedol, a 9-dan master, four to one in a 5 game match. Along with constant new developments like OpenAI’s successful project on winning DOTA 2 duels with computer intelligence, AI development is increasing to a point that for the first time in history, the intellect of humans is not the best at everything anymore. Computers are beginning to become smarter, better, and faster than us at performing more and more tasks every year. Some call our time the Information Age; I sometimes like to call it the Intelligence Revolution.
Fitting, because the last time machines leaped forward to become more efficient than us, it was called the Industrial Revolution. Whereas today our devices overpower us mentally, back then was the first time industry overpowered human labor physically to produce infrastructure and goods.
Agrarianism through Industrialism
Before the existence of industry, the world operated on an agrarian economy; that is, farmers brought wealth into the world via cultivating crops, and craftsmen and merchants existed to supplement and synergize with agriculture to produce a balance of wealth and value in the population. Agricultural laborers worked the fields by hand, plowing, tending, and harvesting the crops with their own strength or with the assistance of animals such as mules and oxen. Craftsmen produced various goods such as tools and clothing, and provided services such as construction. Their tasks would be done by hand or with simple machines to amplify natural human ability such as the cotton gin and the pulley. Merchants profited from buying and selling goods to the right customers who needed them. All of them worked together in harmony for millennia in a world dominated by human labor.
This balance was slowly but surely upset by the advent of fossil fuels.
The widespread usage of coal and eventually oil brought a drastic change to all parts of life and the economy. Agriculture gradually became so efficient that technology was cheaper to operate and produced a higher volume of crops than a solely human workforce. The jobs of artisans and craftsmen reminiscent of the guilds in the middle ages were over, for mass production in powered factories churned out thousands and thousands of manufactured goods cheaply and more efficiently than ever before, rendering most skilled workers too inefficient to compete in the market. Millions of people worldwide flocked from rural areas to urban centers, looking for factory jobs, as their old professions were replaced by fossil fuel powered machines that did their work faster, cheaper, and better than they did by hand.
While most were caught in the turmoil of a revolutionized job market, working in undesirable conditions for low pay, a small group of enterprising people rose above the rest. Entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and many others took advantage of the changing economy to create massive business empires, becoming the Captains of Industry we know today.
Instead of being reactive to the Industrial Revolution like most people, these businessmen were proactive, exploiting and driving the Revolution’s progress by organizing and innovating in ways that most of the population was not trained to do. To succeed in our new “Intelligence Revolution,” we must train ourselves to become proactive and learn to become more creative and entrepreneurial than what we are taught.
Education
Our current system for bringing up and training youth for the workforce comes from the middle of the Industrial Age; called the factory model of education, it was created in the late eighteenth century to fit the innovations in technology that spurred the Industrial Revolution. Students were made to sit in regular rows, listen to lectures on different subjects on a regular bell schedule, and trained to “fit in” with the social and societal demands around them. This model of education is called what it is because it resembles a factory, assembling a production line of students to fit into the cogs of the well-oiled machine of our industrialized society as various types of workers. Some are trained to be blue-collar or white-collar workers, some scientists and researchers, some cleaners or factory workers, but all are trained to be specialized, uniform, and replaceable.
Just like the manual laborers who lost their jobs to machines, we’re still being brought up for an economy and a world that is quickly fading behind us in time. Just like them, we all face the spectre of impending replaceability at the hands of technology, this time in our intellect rather than our labor.
We must look back to the past to face the future. The time to revolutionize the way students are taught to learn, grow, and bring value to the world is now. Instead of leading students to take jobs and earn a wage that may be taken by a machine soon, as we did many years ago before the Industrial Revolution, we need to guide them to become innovators and entrepreneurs, who make new jobs and opportunities for humans and machines alike for our collective benefit.
Entrepreneurs are innovative, creative, driven, adaptable, wise, passionate, curious, and leaders of themselves and society. As students, let’s all learn to become entrepreneurial in some way, regardless of whether we become the next Steve Jobs or even start a business at all. Our techniques and attitudes towards life, work, and learning will ultimately decide our competitiveness in a post-information age world, and staying proactive in a changing economy will prove invaluable to our success.
The ability to lead, inspire, and innovate is one of the few things that is so far untouched by computers. We are incredibly privileged to live today, where our quality of life eclipses the entirety of human history; let’s be proactive like the Captains of Industry in the past to take advantage of it while we can to pave the road to a better future for us all.
