[falcor84]

Let me put it like this: I expect AI to replace much of human wage labor over the next 20 years and push many of us, and myself almost certainly included, into premature retirement. I'm personally concerned that in a few years, I'll find my software proficiency to be as useful as my chess proficiency today is useful to Stockfish. I am afraid of a massive social upheaval both for myself and my family, and for society at large.

[chongli]

Here “much of” is doing the heavy lifting. Are you willing to commit to a percentage or a range?

I work at an insurance company and I can’t see AI replacing even 10% of the employees here. Too much of what we do is locked up in decades-old proprietary databases that cannot be replaced for legal reasons. We still rely on paper mail for a huge amount of communication with policyholders. The decisions we make on a daily basis can’t be trusted to AI for legal reasons. If AI caused even a 1% increase in false rejections of claims it would be an enormous liability issue.

[falcor84]

Yes, absolutely willing to commit. I can't find a single reliable source, but from what I gather, over 70% of people in the West do "pure knowledge work", which doesn't include any embodied actuvities. I am happy to put my money that these jobs will start being fully taken over by AI rapidly soon (if they aren't already), and that by 2035, less than 50% of us will have a job that doesn't require "being there".

And regarding your example of an insurance company, I'm not sure about that industry, but seeing the transformation of banking over the last decade to fully digital providers like Revolut, I would expect similar disruption there.

[zeroonetwothree]

I would easily take the other side of this bet. It just reminds me when everyone was sure back in 2010 that we’d have self driving cars within 10 years and human drivers would be obsolete. Today replacing human drivers fully is still about 10 years away.

[falcor84]

Yes, getting the timelines right is near impossible, but the trajectory is clear to me, both on AI taking over pure knowledge work and on self-driving cars replacing human drivers. For the latter, there's a lot of inertia and legalities to overcome, and scaling physical things is hard in general, but Waymo alone crossed 450,000 weekly paid rides last month [0], and now that it's self-driving on highways too, and is slated to launch in London and Tokyo this year, it seems to me that there's no serious remaining technical barrier to it replacing human drivers.

As for a bet, yes, I'd really be happy to put my money where my mouth is, if you're familiar with any long bets platform that accepts pseudonymous users.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/waymo-paid-rides-robotaxi-te...

[dehsge]

There are other bounds here at play that are often not talked about.

Ai runs on computers. Consider the undecidability of Rices theorem. Where compiled code of non trivial statements may or may not be error free. Even an ai can’t guarantee its compiled code is error free. Not because it wouldn’t write sufficient code that solves a problem, but the code it writes is bounded by other externalities. Undecidability in general makes the dream of generative ai considerably more challenging than how it’s being ‘sold.

[catlifeonmars]

> massive social upheaval

You don’t even need AGI for that though, just unbounded investor enthusiasm and a regulatory environment that favors AI providers at the expense of everyone else.

My point is there are number of things that can cause large scale unemployment in the next 20 years and it doesn’t make sense to worry about AGI specifically while ignoring all of the other equally likely root causes (like a western descent into oligarchy and crony capitalism, just to name one).