Losing our brains with disruptive technologies (X): Think-Work-Produce-Invest
Have a beautiful Tuesday. Today before publishing our material, I wish to share an aquarelle I have been painting lately. It is called “The first Bride”. I painted it using a photo reference for the major details from a photographer called Teksomolika. This is a display watercolor for watching the quality of my compositions. I wish to offer the possibility to all the fiancées, brides to be, or those who have already married, to be painted. With the money I can gather through this art, I will start to cover my most urgent operational expenses (technological and content format). I require to pay reliable sources of information or databases (which pricing goes from US$3,000 dollars to US$20,000 dollars per year) and definitely I must upgrade my site a.s.a.p. I paint at nights, at dawn, on the weekends, and on Thursdays (which is my weekday off).
Let´s go to the point. Let´s begin. Today I won´t explain introductions, or contexts because I wish you to think about some ideas that have occurred to me meanwhile I walk in between the greens of the trees.
As you may know, every time I post, it takes several hours (sometimes days) to do data research in public domain websites, and afterward reading them, I filter the data, prepare the slides, draft and edit the text as many times as possible. I know there are circumstances in which I may select an unreliable or wrong source to make our analysis, or it will be possible to omit a grammar mistake… but trust me even those slips are part of my business model testing. Eleonora Escalante Strategy has been testing its concept, value proposition, and business model since its inception, and during the “valley of death (VOD) stage”, we, the entrepreneurs have the right to make mistakes. It is in this phase that we are allowed to make them. This is the rite of passage in which all entrepreneurs of the world have the legitimate freedom for errors, lapses, misdeeds, or whatever name you can call our experimentation and trial-error VOD phase.
All our work activities start with our brains. Whatever we do for a living (either in our professional bearings, work of arts, entrepreneurship endeavors, or academic professions) or if we are lucky to have money and our business is to decide where are we going to put it), everything starts in our brain. When I was preparing this material, I intersected an article called “Top 10: Life’s greatest inventions”, in which the author wrote that “the brains are often seen as a crowning achievement of evolution – bestowing the ultimate human traits such as language, intelligence, and consciousness”. In consequence, whatever we do for work are actions that start in our brains. Our brains start to provoke cognitive content on what to do for a living, activities that we can do properly and sell either because we have been prepared to do it, or we are learning naturally about them.
Our current thinking capacity is a result of more than 6,000 years of evolution, which has started to revert.
In the past, to satisfy our needs and wants in one way or another, human brains evolved over time to become scientists, inventors, innovators. Century by century, humans’ big challenge was to become inventors. Our brains have not stopped being curious and generating ideas to fix our wants and needs. To make our life easier through gains. To alleviate our most difficult pains. Our brains were always searching for methods or ways in which we can satisfy or fulfill our non-ending desire to find stuff that is useful, functional and money granted. Before the first industrial revolution, our ancestors were interested to find radical ways to evolve. Once we end up with one invention, then we continued with the next one… and that has been our life since then.
Our ancestors were also leveraging their human activities, repeating testing and experimenting when following their voyeurism. I doubt they were doing something to cash out for a living, but because their indescribable thirst for discoveries was endless. In my last publications, I have stated our ancestors did not have computers neither Smartphones, nor calculators, but they were able to create thousands and thousands of inventions using a pen, designing it in a piece of paper, and later experimenting days by days, years by years, even decades. And guess what, they did it all without the help of machines. My thesis is our ancestors were smarter than us. Their brain status evolution was higher than ours, nevertheless, they lacked the contextual impact of their inventions into future history.
What are the top ten inventions related to “our think-work-produce-invest activities” of all times? In my quest, I visited several web popular sites on the internet searching for an answer to this inquiry. Independently of the criteria used by those who have provided the data, please take a look at them here:
If you wish to download the last slides in PDF Format, click here: Eliescalante Losing Our brains with disruptive tech 10 top inventions.
After watching the slides, let me ask you, what is the big issue with our brains?
Are our brains wired to never satiate its desire for more and forever more quickly?. And once we find something new, we are always in search of destroying it for improving it. Either transform it from big size to micro or nano dimensions. Or we are always looking for adjacencies in order to expand the same invention for different uses which are not ethically acceptable. And we have forgotten the spirit of Alexander Fleming when he (by mistake) invented penicillin. Or is it that our brains are simply trying to find a replacement in machines? And I wonder, when are we going to stop to search for more JUST FOR MONEY.
Our brains are in the process to become morons. We have converted our brains into morons or retard brains for the sake of making money. Leaving the purpose outside.
We are very far from what Leonardo Davinci was, or what Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein delivered. We believe that because we have fancy screens on a touchdown colorful microplasma, we are on full evolution. We have believed that because we put space rockets up, utilizing zillions of petroleum liters; we are smarter than our past ancestors who observed the stars to find a purpose in their societies, or those who invented the first airplane to become a bird. We have considered that because we have been able to build higher towers like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, or because we have invented the super velocity trains in Asia, we are now smarter than before? We believe that with the introduction of plastics, we are now safer than before when in reality our oceans are suffering from industrious pollution. We believe that we have solved our industrial needs and wants when in reality we have sunk our environment into a crisis that is considered by many as the “climate change destruction”. We have lied to us in relation to our brain’s condition. We have regressed to paleolithic times.
Our brains’ capacities to work, invest, produce are simply a reflection of how we actually think. How are our brains functioning? And we are not in an evolution state, we are regressing to the prehistoric ages where our ancestors couldn´t make math calculations. There is no difference between the paleolithic humans who were not able to make calculations and us (we are not able to make anything without a calculator or excel or a software computing program).
Our inventions to work, produce and invest have trapped us in our own ambuscade. Our brains are draining since the invention of computers. The computers were done to help us to facilitate our work, but now they learned to do our work. Industrial machines were fabricated to help us to create without our arms or our own strength. More, quickly, safely. But now the same machines, have transformed our brains into slugs without the desire to put efforts to solve the issues that machines have entrapped us. The transportation systems as we know them today (airplanes, cars, motorcycles, boats, submarines, trains, etc), were invented to help us to move expeditiously, avoiding the dangers in our paths. But now we are creating self-managing cars that promise to drive us to different places. And we continue inventing things without a purpose. Excessively. And each new invention has terminated the predecessor one. Just because it was slower, or because it was too expensive, or it was not famous or it wasn´t trendy or it was out of date.
I believe it is time to pause and review our brains for a few decades. I encourage the decision-makers of this world to take each of the top 1000 inventions of our times and profoundly analyze them. We need to analyze the motives or purposes of our technologies’ appearance, and how these inventions affected our past, present, and future for better and for worst, not just to our brains, but to our planet. We need to see what has happened before continuing further. My thesis is that we have forgotten the “purpose” of the inventions. The “real purpose to protect the planet and help us all to have a decent quality of life” has been left out of the equation. We simply dismissed the main “purpose”, and we simply switched our inventions for “profitability”, instead of integral value propositions. We are killing our brains. It is time to STOP, and ask ourselves What do we want from here?
In my next publication, we will visit the last modern technologies (from 2000 to 2020) of our think-work-produce-invest cycle, and we will end with a strategic reflection about them.
Thank you.
Sources of reference utilized for this article:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9951-top-10-lifes-greatest-inventions/#ixzz6CwmPcEvxe by
http://shortsleeveandtieclub.com/the-top-10-inventions-of-all-time/
https://interestingengineering.com/19-great-inventions-that-revolutionized-history
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inventions-what-are-the-10-greatest-of-our-time/
https://www.inc.com/paul-grossinger/what-are-the-25-greatest-inventions-of-all-time.html
https://www.history.com/news/11-innovations-that-changed-history
https://www.history.co.uk/shows/mankind-the-story-of-all-of-us/articles/mankinds-greatest-inventions
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/explore-top-ten-innovations/
https://www.livescience.com/33749-top-10-inventions-changed-world.html
https://www.britannica.com/list/10-inventions-that-changed-your-world
https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/greatest-inventions-past-1000-years
https://startupguide.com/the-40-greatest-innovations-of-all-time
Disclaimer: Illustrations in Watercolor are painted by Eleonora Escalante. Other types of illustrations or videos (which are not mine) are used for educational purposes ONLY. Nevertheless, the majority of the pictures, images or videos shown on this blog are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos or images posted unless otherwise stated.
Eleonora Escalante Strategy 
1 Comment »