Once globalization ceases to exist, cities like Singapore, Dubai, and Hong Kong will have no other function. The millions of white-collar workers within them have no real survival skills. Being good at creating spreadsheets does no good in a collapsing world. If you can’t fight or farm, you’re going to die off. It’s that simple.
You have to shift your values from achievement and material accumulation to making the lives of people around you better off. Think about how to share yourself with others. Once you develop that mentality, community naturally consolidates around you, and you become much more likely to survive a crisis.
This one made me laugh cuz I was literally having an agent do my sheets. I have no real skill already. Listening to his podcast is basically swallowing the toughest red pill, and unfortunately most of us are white collars, academics and students.
Question from student
What do you think about technology’s development as a natural movement that proceeds with time? To explain, I’ll reference Plato’s Phaedrus, where a god presents a human king with the gift of writing. The king denies the gift, arguing it would destroy people’s memory, imagination, and oral storytelling tradition.
Something similar is happening now. While we lost oral storytelling—which was core to being human—we gained reading and writing, an aspect of humanity the king couldn’t foresee. Do you think something analogous could happen with transhumanism, where we lose part of our humanity but gain something we can’t yet imagine?
Prof X. answers
Exactly, that’s a great point. For most of human history, societies resisted writing for that exact reason. Oral tradition forced us to maintain strong memories and focus on the beauty of the spoken voice. The Druids, for example, refused writing because their poetry and spells required specific intonations impossible to capture in text. Writing allowed for mass dissemination, but it destroyed the aura of the spoken voice.
Once we did develop writing, it radically changed the human mind, and the same thing may happen with AI. That offers an important lesson: change is neither inherently good nor bad. Change is just change that leads to new possibilities, and it’s ultimately up to us to take advantage of them.
Kinda the perfect final question, despite Prof not elaborating much. Change is change, embrace it.
Conversation edited for brevity.