Book Update

Chapter 1

From starving hungry laborers in lock ins to reduced working hours, productivity has endured vast transformation throughout many different time periods. To dig further into the depths of how productivity has, in itself, transformed as well as how it has transformed entire cultures, civilizations, and world powers, let’s begin with the evolutionary spectrum after the period of stasis.

1 From about 500,000 to 200,000 years ago, studies have found that tools such as the hand axe underwent significantly minimal changes throughout this period of minimally heightened levels of human ancestral intelligence. After this, however, a sharp increase in brain to body size ratios augmented our ability to reason, resulting in the modern human. The modern human was a result of thousands of years of natural selection and Darwinian evolution resulting in an ever growing state of progression in intelligence characterized by enhanced cognitive abilities, brain to body mass ratios, lingual abilities, abstract thinking, communication abilities, and adaptive capabilities. For simplicity’s sake, this book will use three critical components as the building blocks to define human intelligence. They are as follows: 2

1.      A property that an individual agent has as it interacts with its environment or environments.

2.      Is related to the agent’s ability to succeed or profit with respect to some goal or objective.

3.      Depends on how able t[he] agent is to adapt to different objectives and environments.

With this out of the way, we can begin to divulge in the prowess of human intelligence and how we have derived the conceptualization of modern productivity and the purpose for it.

            The progression of human intelligence has skyrocketed us a long way forward on the evolutionary spectrum. Thus, with the origins of productivity being grounded in philosophical questioning and human aspirations to improve early tools, used for agriculture and hunting, the essential question for productivity is buried here: How can we make things (more specifically, tools in this case) better? How can we improve facets of our lives, faster communication, easier modes of advancing our careers, more feasible methods of understanding how to engage in the process of making things better, et cetera?

            Through our understanding of the fundamentals of productivity and its roots, we can now begin to submerge ourselves in the philosophy of the purpose for productive living. Originally, the purpose for living a productive life was simple; by doing so, you could eat. However, with available access to food, loads of time spent needlessly scrolling on social media, and machines to reduce the need for habitual processes in factories to let a load off our mental capacity needed for such tasks, the purpose of productivity is, now, much more complex. This complexity has resulted in a wave of misunderstanding from generations of modern humans. In fact, one concept of humanity I would like to address concerns people’s feeling like they have no purpose. We do have a purpose: to ensure our posterity the keys to successful living. Only then will future generations have the ability to further explore, evolve, and emancipate the human capacity to its fullest degree.

Side note: Passages are highlighted and numbered for future consultation (i.e. when I come back to cite my sources). Additionally, excerpts from this draft of my book will DEFINITELY change at some point or another. These highlighted portions, for the time being (1st draft), will not be cited except on a separate document. If you would like links to these alternate sources, let me know.

Thank you for all of the support!