Thought provokers vs entrepreneurs

I was riding in an Uber ride. The driver was an Indian guy who had been living in America for about 15 years, he told me. We started talking about cricket and the unbelievable players both Pakistan and India had during the 90s. Then the discussion went to movies where we both agreed that perhaps the age of mega superstars was over and that we were not going to have classic heroes such as Amitabh, Shahrukh, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise anymore.

He started talking about how social media and streaming service have captured the market and how lucky were the entrepreneurs who jumped on the bandwagon in a timely manner and made a fortune for themselves. I started hinting at how too much social media and devices have actually caused so much harm and how AI was perhaps going to do some real damage to all societies around the world. He was more interested in how one could benefit from this coming wave. And I don't blame him for wanting to get rich from exploiting this. However, that is when I also had a realisation. Almost every Indian I know has the same mindset. Nobody, at least the ones I have talked to, have ever expressed concerns or worries about the social, mental or societal collapse technologies can cause.

There is a fine line between entrepreneurs and those who think and see problems. The entrepreneurs find a problem and offer a solution for it in order to benefit from it. They sell the solution they provide. They search for problems not to correct them, not to get in their way but rather to devise a solution in order to enrich themselves and their business. The thinker or the thought provoker sees a problem and tells others about it. He doesn't want to profit from a solution he will provide but rather sees a problem and sees it as a problem and desires that his peers would see it too. His solution is for people to detect the problem. A society that has lost the ability to detect problems is a dying one. In India and even in Pakistan, the next big hero is always the guy who exploits the popular tide and profits from it.

In fact, arguably the most popular of all entrepreneurs, at least in our time, Steve Jobs used to say that change was brought about by people who saw things differently. A thought provoker sees a problem not to profit from it but rather to correct it and cause others to think differently than the popular tide of the time.

If a system rewards a man who doesn't tell a society high on drugs to stop consuming but rather starts selling to it or changes the manner in which they get high, will only produce Escobars and Zuckerbergs, who are nothing but names of rich scumbags. Netflix didn't tell people to stop wasting time watching movies but rather changed how people watched movies.

We live in a world with countless religions. Yet, those who serve bad habits such as selling tobacco, gasoline, sugar, and so forth are super rich and those who question the existence of these products are either struggling to pay their bills, are either behind bars, or are pushed into oblivion so that people can get the right message.

The conversation with the Indian driver reminded me of my Pakistan Studies textbook in school where it was written that when the Brits came to India and occupied this region, it was the Hindus at the time that facilitated their rule while the Muslims fought against it because they didn't like this new normal. The Hindus jumped on the bandwagon and did achieve many successes for themselves. But success doesn't make the journey right. Wrong is still wrong and those who have lost the ability to see it are the real losers.