How can humanity respond to AI?

 

As AI adoption ramps up worldwide, a counter-movement is emerging as authors speculate about humanity's role once AI replaces most corporate thinking at work. So Ryan Levesque's Return to Real tries to figure out what human advantages will survive in the age of AI. 

I think this genre is still very new, and I doubt anyone has the right answers, so I have to admit that the book disappointed me. It looks like there are many more creative ways to get folks to touch grass more and tap into their innate authenticity.

One useful idea explored on this blog is that a counter-AI movement will gain some force, and businesses need to be prepared to tap into it. So sometimes, when I meet up with blog readers, I tell them that if they have a monetisable way to get folks to "touch-grass", they should give it a shot. I doubt a counter-movement would be strong enough to build massive companies, but a few first movers might be able to make a living and avoid total obsolescence from AI.

Of course, while I'm dispensing my thoughts, I need to also ask myself what I'm doing about my own humanity, given that I'm now so deep in AI, I'm balancing multiple AI projects outside my work.

So here's what I have done:

• The counter-AI is now very credible because one of the most popular courses at Harvard today is "Hum 10", a brutal Humanities course based on the Classics. Students spend many hours grappling with Classic books and writing without using AI, based on their Professor's instructions.
• At my own level, I asked Claude to gain inspiration from this "Hum 10" program and similar programs across the Ivy League universities to design a self-study program for myself. This makes sense because AI is smarter than most humanities professors.
• This is a lightweight program designed to just take one hour of my time each week, but collectively will take a year to complete.

Week 1 looks like this. 

I've finished my Orientation, and I find that as I get older, I'm more willing to play along and patiently find practical insight in this study of the humanities. And it's actually quite stimulating because I have to keep asking myself what makes a classic classic. In Week 2, I had to process 600 lines of Homer's Iliad that detail the wrath of Achilles, and this targeted reading helped me think about situations where a falling-out occurs between a star employee and his aura-farming asshole boss.

I shared this with my CET law student, and her idea is that this should be some kind of salon where people discuss philosophical ideas, and this document can serve as a blueprint to provide some kind of structure for people to skinny-dip into the humanities pool and not be judged or graded by a stuffy academic who might have no actual corporate experience. I also suspect that the biggest beneficiaries would be the engineering and CS types like me.

Am I onto something here? 

As I delve into this project, I will keep blogging to connect it to work and the FIRE movement. 

Anyway, I'm not gatekeeping the document; you can find me on social media to get it. If you have a venue where the salon can take place, please share it with me. 

If you are interested in joining me, just let me know.

Maybe this can blossom into a Toastmasters-like movement, but without the FAs and MLM people!

The 12 million Yen gap in Japanese retirement adequacy

 

Ok, I wanted to blog about the second key insight from the ROSA Symposium on Successful Aging, and someone has already done a good job summarising the University of Nagoya's results. You can find the link on Reddit here.

Japan faces a serious retirement crisis: only 20% of its citizens can sustain retirement on their own wealth (for 25 years). 80% rely on government pensions and aren't ready for retirement, so they have to work until they die. The average shortfall in retirement savings is surprisingly small by Singapore standards—JPY 12 million, or less than SGD $98,000.

More importantly, we shouldn't have to rely on Japanese data to extrapolate retirement outcomes for a super-aged society; I would have preferred a similar study in Singapore. 

Based on outdated 2021 LKYSPP numbers, a 55-year-old needs $1,768 for a baseline budget. Multiply this by 12 and divide by the 4% safe withdrawal rate. A Singaporean needs a $530,000 portfolio to sustain retirement, but in practice this number is smaller because CPF-Life can cover most basic expenses after age 65.

Based on my projection, meeting CPF-Life at FRS isn't enough to cover this $1,768 after accounting for inflation. You won't start receiving this payout until you turn 65, but if you can rent a room in your flat for $800 a month, that should be more than enough.

The problem with this calculus is that it incentivizes Singaporeans to seek stable employment and a decent-sized HDB flat, making it hard for a rational citizen to consider unconventional paths to success. If AI somehow forces a rethink between entrepreneurship and steady employment, the house of cards will fall, leaving a cohort unable to retire at an older age. 

As for me, with human potential and effort being rapidly diminished by technological advancement, the only rational thing parents can do is build portfolios they can pass to their kids, not for pleasure or a good life, but for basic survival. 

That said, I think Singaporeans are far better off than their Japanese counterparts, given the numbers I've seen so far. 

Are Fractional roles the bullshit jobs of Singapore's future?

 

One highlight of this week is attending SMU's seminar, hosted by the Center for Research on Successful Aging (ROSA), and I've decided to write about it in two parts.

The first part is exciting news about fractional jobs, and it wasn't even on the seminar agenda. Minister Indranee Rajah discussed a fairly creative policy idea the government is working on: over the next few years, parents with children will have much more leave to take on childcare or caregiver roles. One problem is that companies will be short-staffed more often. 

So the government looked at older workers and retrenched staff in their 40s and 50s, suggesting they take on fractional roles in companies so younger Singaporeans can start families.

This idea was met with strong enthusiasm because, on paper, it is brilliant. But as of now, there are no policy details. Can older fractional workers handle the tools and work of younger workers who need to go on leave? Will taxpayers have to pay to let companies onboard these older workers? Can a fractional worker cover for more than one company? These are questions the really smart folks at MOM would need to address, but I think we should be open-minded about fundamental changes to how we work in Singapore.

I'm also quite glad that I may need to reassess my idea of fractional employment.

I've always thought that fractional jobs are bullshit jobs for people who cannot convince someone to employ them fully. I dare to say this here because I have an Adjunct role in a tertiary institution, so I'm fractionally employed myself. I might be impressed by someone if a fractionally employed person actually has a contract with more than one party; then it's not too different from a Gen Z or Millennial who is overemployed.

I also face a real difficulty when I am fractionally employed. Every role has a learning curve and unique tools that I often have to master without pay. In my role, these include attendance-taking apps and the systems that let me do the work, so I get paid on time. Working for multiple organizations would multiply these unpaid administrative tasks. I expect the taxpayer to support the worker as they move up the learning curve, at least to the point where they can function as a replacement headcount for a regular employee.

With structural support for fractional employment, we will not just see the elderly and retrenched take on these roles; I expect people at all stages of life to take them on to redesign their lives. 

For the FIRE movement, fractional roles strongly appeal to folks pursuing Barista FIRE or mothers with young children who want more time with their kids. 

For me, to assess the sincerity of decision-makers, I would like to see the following:

a) Some kind of incentive for companies to get tax breaks to fractionally hire (or even fire) older workers above age 45 that includes some in-house or corporate training.

b) Some kind of legal recognition that hammers out the rights of fractional workers. Our current system, which distinguishes between an employee and a contractor, may need a third category to make it easier to hire fractional workers while still preventing exploitation.

Finally, we need to accept that gaming fractional employment relationships should become the norm in Singapore. I currently provide training in the public and private sector. I often reuse the software I pay for to produce investment content for Polytechnic students, and I use my pedagogical training to refine my ERM slides.

Whatever it is, I hope we support this policy, since it'll probably make fractional employment less of a bullshit job in the future. 

The Everywhere Millionaire

 

Hot off the press after coming back from the Cameron Highlands, I've been reading this cool book by Zidar and Zwick called The Everywhere Millionaire. It continues a line of books that began with The Millionaire Next Door by sociologist Thomas Stanley, and this time it's written by economists armed with lots of government data.

When you use data to figure out what millionaires are actually like, you risk the insights not transplanting into another society like Singapore.

The only thing I found useful is the millionaires' affinity for mischief and rule-breaking as kids, which I also observe among Singapore businessmen. I find this isn't sufficiently emphasized in local business literature; sometimes you need a level of non-conformity to do well in entrepreneurial pursuits.

Another point the book keeps repeating is that rich, successful millionaires all use some kind of pass-through tax instrument to make their money. These are similar corporate entities like Sole Proprietorships and LLPs in Singapore. It works because, as it turns out, large corporations face much higher tax rates than individuals, so companies that use these pass-through instruments can achieve massive tax savings, even though these rates are astronomical compared to Singapore figures.

The book then explains why these tax loopholes are maintained by the same wealthy people through political lobbying via PACs, or Political Action Committees, and the book frames one of the biggest problems in America as that these millionaires can use their wealth to influence political outcomes that seem to help "small businesses" at the expense of the American consumer, like blocking corporations from cutting out the middlemen to sell cars at a lower price. 

In such a case, I'm more reluctant to condemn American business lobbyists or the inequality inherent in their system.

Starting a business is a high-risk endeavor, and failure rates are high regardless of where you do it. Maybe America's strength is that business winners eventually gain the privilege of maintaining their wins through political lobbying, encouraging constant entrepreneurial risk-taking. 

Maybe as Singaporeans we should not be too hasty to judge.

But I do wish that NUS or NTU would perform a similar study in Singapore. 

Without the data, my intuition is that our local millionaires are mostly the folks who own landed property and real estate along Bukit Timah Road, or those who run legal and medical practices in Singapore.

Do you think a similar study in Singapore would be controversial?

My trip into the mountains to study Existentialism and what it means for the FIRE movement

 

Something got into me during the semester holidays. After conducting my Early Retirement Masterclass and teaching a semester of both Law and Data Analytics, I told myself I needed to head solo into the mountains to study existentialism.

So last Saturday, I crossed the Causeway, took the ETS to KL, then spent a day meeting students and relatives before taking a 5-hour bus to Cameron Highlands with a book on Existentialism. In Cameron, I tried two approaches to enjoy the place. The first was an intense one-day tour of the area that covered about 80% of what I needed. The second was a day to recover from the first, where I just hung around Tanah Rata and went where my nose led me. 

As a result, both extremes don't really suit me, and while I finished the book, I still couldn't really understand what Existentialism is all about.

So this article is my attempt to reflect on the few Existentialist concepts I was able to grasp in my solo travel, which I hope the reader will appreciate.

So the basic notion is that we can't really choose our circumstances when we are born. We have a starting hand in life, and we also inherit social expectations from the people around us, societal norms, and built-in behavioral biases from fields like evolutionary psychology. 

But we are not bystanders; we have to live, so some of us take up careers, buy things, and pursue status, all to impress people we may not know or like, just to conform to society. People should do this; you must act in a particular way. Chinese New Year is like an audit where you are ranked in personal achievements relative to your cousins.

Conforming and being conventional is okay, until you realize our time in this world is limited. When you conform to others' or society's expectations, you aren't really taking the time to do what you really want, and existentialists see this as acting in bad faith. So does it make sense to be a walking resume and just be the kind of cousin that gets all the accolades during CNY?

So how should one live? 

First, you need to understand that you are in this prison-like situation; then you need to take ownership of your life. Make choices for your life despite these societal constraints. This is what existentialists say is being authentic. 

I see many of these concepts in practice as I travel solo. 

When I travel alone, I don't need to consider the needs of fellow travelers, so I can do what I want, but only for the short time I have before I return to Singapore. But this freedom comes with some anxiety. So, I have to make different choices about the trip's intensity and figure out which itinerary I prefer. Like A/B testing. The intense day trip was physically uncomfortable, but I saw many things and even made new friends on LinkedIn. The day I did nothing was blissful, but I felt vulnerable to FOMO. In the end, I was just happy to see my cousin so that I could bitch about my trip over a cup of Teh Halia.

I've always had an inkling that Existentialism will play a major role in the FIRE movement.

Once you attain it, financial independence will give you a lot of optionality in life. I've dedicated more than two decades to pursuing and then teaching it. But an existentialist will laugh and say that financial independence is just a beginning and not even a person's final form.

Optionality gained from financial independence should drive more agency in life. 

If you don't have to work anymore, what would you do? 

Whatever you do needs to have meaning because your life is short. So retirement may be acting in bad faith because RE is already built into FIRE by definition. 

Why should you retire just to signal that you've gained financial independence?

Mirroring a concept in philosophy, when you gain financial independence, you've just begun existing in Singapore society.

Existence precedes Essence. 

There is fundamentally no new meaning in your life just because you can live off your investment income. I used to call FI a person's Financial Nirvana, but an existentialist will disagree.

But now, with your new financial power, you need to exercise your agency to break away from the notion that you are working for money. 

Life is too short to work for money after you have money.

Without a clear definition or meaning of life, existentialists believe that people now have the freedom to choose a life path that gives themselves meaning.

So this is the glide path for folks who gain financial independence. 

First you can get enough income without work. Since you are no longer confined to the social expectation of having a career, you might need to find what kind of work, or non-work, gives your life meaning. 

Then you do it. 

You gain authorship over your own life.

If, after much introspection, you still want to retire early, so be it!

So I'm at the tail end of my trip now. I hope to get back to my mundane existence in Singapore tomorrow. I think I've gone too far bringing such a dry philosophy book with me into the mountains. 

I will limit these projects to perhaps just once a year. 

The phenomenology of Financial Independence

Before arriving in Cameron Highlands, I took a 5-hour bus to Kuala Lumpur and pushed through a book titled At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell, which made a valiant attempt to explain existential philosophy. I found a section on the eccentricity of philosophers interesting, after struggling to learn anything.

I guess if I can understand just a tiny part of the book and can apply it to my work, it's a small win, and I can come back from the mountains a satisfied guy.

So the concept I struggled with was phenomenology. It is a particular way of looking at something from a viewpoint other than facts. So when you practice phenomenology, you describe a phenomenon. Take, for instance, coffee. Phenomenology is not about the chemical composition of coffee or how many stages coffee beans need to go through to become the cup of coffee you have today. The phenomenon of coffee is more like its rich aroma filling your nose just before you drink it, and the feeling of drifting out of your stupor as you get your first caffeine hit.

So naturally, I have to apply this newfound skill to understanding what financial independence is; it's certainly not about the current yield of your investment portfolio, but what freedom means for people whose passive income exceeds their expenses.

But...Who am I kidding... AI can do the job better than me. 

This is what ChatGPT said:

Financial independence is not merely a numerical condition in which passive income exceeds expenditure; it is a transformation in how a person experiences time, work, risk, and choice. Before financial independence, time is often structured by economic necessity: work schedules, income requirements, debt obligations, and career incentives shape the horizon of everyday life. Financial independence loosens this structure and creates greater temporal autonomy.

Phenomenologically, this shifts from constraint to optionality. Work is no longer experienced primarily as an obligation imposed by financial need, but as an activity that may be chosen, modified, or abandoned. Decisions can be evaluated less by their immediate monetary consequences and more by whether they are meaningful, interesting, or consistent with one's values.

Yet financial independence does not automatically produce fulfillment. Removing financial necessity can also expose questions that employment previously concealed: What is worth doing when one no longer has to work? What provides structure, identity, recognition, and purpose? The experience can therefore contain both liberation and disorientation.

The deeper significance of financial independence is consequently not freedom from work, but freedom from economic compulsion. Its value lies in expanding the individual's field of possible action—the ability to decide how one's finite time should be spent rather than having that decision largely dictated by the need to earn an income.

Wow ! 

That blew my mind.

Even if you think it fundamentally states the obvious, phenomenology allows the user to isolate intuitive, human emotions from something, which I think can apply to marketing, or at least to motivating people to achieve financial independence. This is certainly consequential because I'm more than happy to couch financial independence in such terms when I create content.

Of course, to leverage AI at this level, you need to put in the effort to understand phenomenology—that is a tall order. 

I also find that in Cameron Highlands, I have to study every single influence on existentialism. Now I'm grappling with Martin Heidegger's ideas, and I'm so lost that even AI can't really take me very far. I know it has some utility in the FIRE movement, but it remains too abstract for me.

 Maybe I'll be more enlightened tomorrow.

Does agency matter?

I'm currently on a solo adventure in the Cameron Highlands. Between tours, I should have some time to blog.

I have interesting discussions with my young students that aren't always about technology, and there's certainly a lot of anxiety about job availability because of AI. One area I suggest the students develop is agency. At that time, I defined it sociologically — what kind of constraints society places on a student and how they can overcome them to be successful on their own terms. My logic is sound: for most of my students, adopting the same success standards as their JC peers would do them little good, regardless of what their parents might think.

But a smart guy in my class has a valid counterpoint. If everybody exercises agency, then the spoils will go to those who exercise the most agency, so the competition remains fierce, and it's back to square one.

I'm a sporting guy; I'm happy to concede the point, although I'm not convinced by his argument yet, but I'm glad he put serious thought into this matter, which itself is an exercise of agency, as the lecturer is not always right.

Fortunately for me, Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, later published a thorough perspective on agency from a psychological standpoint. According to Seligman, agency is comprised of three parts:

• Efficacy - You must believe that you can be the author of your own fate.
• Optimism - You must believe your future will be better than your situation today.
• Imagination - You are creative enough to solve problems your way or envision a better life for yourself.

Surprisingly, most of the book isn't particularly useful to me, as Martin's work reads like a history book, showing that periods of great human flourishing correspond to words in the era's literature that reflect great human agency.

But for me, now I have a new tool to debate agency in class. As it turns out, a diploma program will ideally level up a person's efficacy by improving their skill set, making them more employable, etc.... But a certain proportion of optimism is genetic. Imagination is also a function of personality, like openness to new experiences.

So, in practice, few folks have the capacity for agency. In fact, I can imagine progressives trying to paint agency as something that has links to race, social status, and social capital. Some might say that tolerating agency will magnify inequality, which the political left and sociologists fetishize.

I've got one final point about the book. 

The best part about the book has nothing to do with agency.

As it turns out, Martin Seligman can lucid dream. 

So, as his colleagues begin to die of old age, he can summon them back in his dreams to discuss the topics that he is working on. He admits that these dream colleagues can only answer based on what he knows of their work, and that it's not too different from using AI.