Growing with the Millennial Samurai

The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests

This episode is a tour de force with George Chanos, author of Millennial Samurai, a current futurist and former Attorney General of Nevada. George talks about his “secular bible for the 21st century”, values and talents needed to thrive in the current and coming decade, about AI, singularity, and what the potential of 10x-ing of global GDP means for you and me.
4:11 - “Now you have a high price lawyer, a professional researcher going on a reconnaissance mission into the future, and looking at things that he’s never looked at. And what I found was extraordinary things that really concerned me and excited me and bewildered me.”
6:49 - about his book The Millennial Samurai: “It’s this collection of 182 chapters that are one to three pages each…that have to inspire you, and educate you and motivate you and make you want to read more.”
9:43 - “McKinsey tells us that 47.5% of all jobs that currently exist are susceptible to automation, based on existing technology…so that’s half the jobs.”
12:10 - “...every business in the world will eventually evolve into a place where if something can be automated, it will be automated.”
16:44 - “So counseling, leadership, collaboration, building teams of human beings, leading human beings, working with them, motivating them, inspiring them, these are the occupations of the 21st century that humans will be required for.”
17:45 - “Today we are in the midst of a technological revolution that will dwarf the Industrial Revolution.”
19:42 - according to “Ray Kurzweil, who’s the head of artificial intelligence for Google, who says that by the Singularity, that moment in time that Stephen Hawking called the greatest event in human history, that moment in time when machine intelligence will eclipse human intelligence…that day is coming in 2029…by the end of this decade , we are going to reach a quantum leap in intelligence.”
20:43 - “It’s like a freight train, there’s this incredibly fast freight train that is moving towards us.”
23:16 - “Knowledge is going to be abundant…we will double within the next ten years, humanity will double everything that we’ve learned since the beginning of time.”
25:11 - “A book called The Spatial Web…basically talks about a world filled with trillions of sensors…that will radically increase global efficiencies in terms of resource consumption, resource allocation, resource optimization and that together, this spatial web will essentially 10x the global GDP.”
28:02 - “...there appears to be a loss of freedom…so you won’t own anything, and you’ll be happy. The first part is coming. You won’t own anything, and the second part ‘you’ll be happy’ is the part that I’m not quite convinced of yet.”
28:53 - “I’ve done a great deal of reading and one of the things that I’ve learned and been most impressed by is how stupid I am. It’s how ignorant I am. And I genuinely believe, I’ve come to believe that that acknowledgement is probably the smartest thing that I’ve ever stumbled upon…the more you embrace your own ignorance, the more you want to learn more, right? If I thought I knew everything, then why keep learning?”
32:03 - “It’s a tipping point between a second enlightenment, where we can have this glorious future, where we harness technology to our mutual advantage to its highest and best use, while allowing the human spirit and freedom to flourish…I also believe that dystopian, a very different technology, a very different scenario is also possible, where a small group of people are controlling that technology.”
32:51 - “How do we ensure that we fall on the right side of that tipping point, that we move into a second enlightenment as opposed to a dark, dystopian future?”