What makes a SuperAger? How do you become one?

What lifestyle factors improve the odds?

How does learning play a role?

How can we be supportive of those facing cognitive decline?

Could a direct confrontation with between the US and Japan been possibly avoided in the Pacific?

What conditions were needed for surrender? Why didn’t it happen sooner?

It was a power struggle for spheres of influence, so probably not avoidable

It was politically difficult for the US to enter the war, but from a policy perspective, they almost needed to enter, and Roosevelt was looking for the opportunity to do so

Japan was defending really strong, and willing to fight at all costs. The US wanted the war to be over, while mounting losses

Japan had quite a lot of victories and had gained new territories that it wanted to keep

Sunk cost fallacy - they were winning territories while also losing many fathers and sons over the last 15 years

We should try to understand history from different perspectives; often without choice we hear a singular narrative

History is complex, and it needs to be considered from broad brush strokes, all the way down to the specific factors of the individuals who have contributed to it

“We shall see” how a Japanese audience responds to this; Japan sees itself as the last victim of the war

The movie is biographical; it takes a neutral stance - let the audience decide for themselves

The period that ensued in Asia after the bomb wasn’t a Cold War - there were many hot wars

He has Japanese - German roots and was amazed that the Pacific War wasn’t taught in his German textbooks growing up, this inspired a natural curiosity

He wanted to explore his roots having grandparents as a veteran of the war 

We discuss war then in now - that war was essentially a characteristic of civilization, and that now, until very recently we forgot about the threat of it

The linguistic perspective is part of his academia, and he wants to introduce the Japanese perspective

Studying the lead up to Pearl Harbor, he sees that Tokyo intentionally mislead their diplomats in Washington

We should look at history as both a by-product of the individual humans who influence outcomes and decisions, as well as considering it as a continuous flow of social values, norms, and ideas

It might not have been just the bombs, but rather the USSR invading Japan that really accelerated the surrender

And we have to take the War in the Pacific had been going on much longer in 1941 - Japan had been fighting China going back to 1931.

Japan’s military history was one of victories, and they consider themselves a great power; the dreams and vision weren’t static, they grew over time

Why does systems thinking matter?

What does the future AI - human relationship look like?

Will AI replace or augment human skillsets?

Where should I be investing my time and efforts as a 21st century knowledge worker?

In the early 2000s, Mohammad was a software developer but realized he needed a "more holistic understanding of the context”

Systems don’t always work or get adopted and it all comes down to how technology interacts with its context of user, organizations and work context - this is called socio-technical behavior.

Algorithms are “not neutral” - they redistribute power, so there is a political element to consider

While systems will become “smarter and smarter,” there are specific parts of work which are human centric

There is also an augmentation narrative, AI can augment us and we can augment it, in a sense we learn and develop together. We can get better together.

Past experiences can be insightful and helpful for understanding the present.. it’s clear some jobs will be gone and in other cases new ones will be created

The term AI has been around since 1956. It’s not a very new concept, but the form has changed. What is interesting is that now algorithms are learning from us, and gaining some tacit knowledge - knowledge which is usually gained though experience

We need to change the way we work and we’re going to develop a symbiotic relationship with technology

One issue is the black box problem. As algorithms learn, they often can’t explain why they made a decision a certain way.

People need to be held accountable. It’s ok if your Netflix recommendation makes an error, but if something actually fails, are our legal and governmental systems simply going to be OK with “sorry, the algorithm predicted that”?

There’s also situations where holistic knowledge is needed:

Emergency medicine: there’s lots of edge cases in the ER, you can’t just feed an algorithm

Customer service: We’re human, we need and want a human touch. We want to be listened to and empathized with

Crisis management: COVID hit, we hadn’t had a pandemic in 100 years, there was no data initially to tell policy makers what to do

Executive decision making: we’re given lots of competing and not always quantifiable information. How do we decide which to pursue?

Give up things which are not in our competitive abilities, spelling bees and multiplication tables aren’t so important anymore; focus on where we have a competitive advantage - creativity, critical thinking, ethics, and soft skills.

Improve AI literacy - understand the limits of the machine, and the capabilities; systems can ‘hallucinate’... understand that

Use technology… you learn from experience, play around with and run tests with Chat GPT or other LLMs

Developing socio-technical organizations - organizations where people are working effectively alongside AI systems are going to have the greatest advantages.

Emotional intelligence is critical

If history provides us any lessons it’s that some of the highest payed jobs weren’t necessarily resilient to automation.

We should be cautiously optimistic about the future: we’re bound to be liberated from mundane tasks, but at the same time we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg, there’s bound to be workplace change and emergent needs to re-skill

What is behavioral economics all about?

Are markets perfect, are people rational?

What can behavioral sciences teach us about goal achievement?

How can we apply lessons from the book “Thinking Fast and Slow”?

One of the things that hooked Dr. Banuri in is in understanding systems and wanting to predict where the future is going to go…

“The economy is a supremely complex thing” and distilling it into something simpler and easier to understand is “brilliant”

We tend to assume people are rational and calculating, but then we see a divergence with our math and the real world. As he got into deeper into economics, he realized this interest in mapping human behavior

We’ve had experiments with central planning and price fixing and it doesn’t really hit the efficiency of a perfectly competitive market; on the other hand we don’t really have great perfectly competitive markets either

Behavioral economics was kind of looked down on, but what’s ‘turned the tide’ is that human behavior is not random; we make predictable errors which are possible to model

On topics such as labor supply, or negotiating deals, people often do not rationally optimize; they deviate from the predicted outcome due to factors like fairness, happiness, and social pressures

Dr. Banuri wants to help people change their behavior in order to reach goals more effectively. There’s something called the intention-action gap. For example, I have an intention to lose weight, but my actions are not in line with my intentions; how does one close that?

With the book, he wants to help people think through these things ahead of time. “I’ve personally had a lot of challenges that I’ve had to overcome, and I think science has something for us to learn from here,” he says.

He believes we need to put in the work ahead of time, it’s a framework which can be applied flexibly

More or less, yes, we start to relate sadness, guilt and other negative emotions to that experience, and we try to avoid that

We generally try to avoid bad information about ourselves which is why 80% of people, when asked, believe they are ‘above-average’; so we have this and other biases

Psychology plays a big role in understanding human behavior, although economists tend to draw a line between them

The author, behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, simplifies logic into two thinking systems - System 1 and System 2

In System 2, “thinking slow”, we are rational and calculating, but this requires quite a lot of brain power; System 1 is “thinking fast”, we use gut feelings and have a default behavior

Generally we have a preference for System 1, because System 2 is energetically costly, so we need to make System 1 work for us