Alex Wissner-Gross

I think switching to manual labor maybe buys a few years, call it three to five years.

I think starting a company, I do think there's a window now to start AI startups and why I'm investing so much time and energy in solving all of physics with physical super intelligence and ensuring that I can help to catalyze the formation of as many possible AI startups as possible now.

I think there's sort of a finite window.

But I think that sort of pushes under the rug what happens five years from now.

Now we're at 2030 and now the singularity which has been going on for at least five years, maybe longer, is well and truly underway.

It's been fully priced into the economy.

We're facing potentially what by the eyes of 2026 looks like technological disemployment or underemployment or unemployment.

What do we do then?

That's where things get interesting.

I think

I suspect sometime in the next five years we're going to start to see crazy left turns in civilization that will shake up our notion of what employment even looks like.

If we make transformative physics discoveries in the next five years, which I'm betting on, I think that could completely change the notion of what people work on.

If it turns out, for example, that

say, colonizing our solar system with advances in physics is a good deal easier than it currently appears to be in an age of chemical rockets.

That could create entirely new labor categories.

Maybe colonizing Mars is a good deal economically more practical

five, 10 years from now than it appears right now.

And maybe we look back on this discussion and the notion of technological underemployment laughing.

I'm reminded at the beginning of the 20th century, there was real concern, history shows, there was real concern in Manhattan specifically that just following a naive exponential of the number of horses that were on the streets of Manhattan

If that smooth exponential kept increasing, and even more so the late 19th century, then at some point humans would be drowning under defecation from horses.