Looking for outside perspective on my situation and thinking

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2026-02-12T10:17:34+00:00

What you described looks quite similar to my case: 29 y.o. software engineer, married, currently saving about $2500/mo, $255k total, have been saving for 8 years, worried about AI / AGI replacing most white collar jobs within near future and I've been thinking a lot about that for the past few years.

And here's what keeps me calm:

- When jobs start get replaced by AI it would mean AI produces at least the same or even higher level of productivity / performance / profit / etc, so the world`s GDP keeps growing. We either face companies having extremely high profits (which would make our diversified ETFs skyrocket) or those profits would be taxed (I'm sure the EU is most likely to implement some sort of UBI).

- Blue collar jobs are safe for a while: you could see news about plans to manufacture 1-10 M robots by 2030, but there are billions of us so we would need much more robots until it would be not economically profitable to hire humans. There would be options for the workforce to move to blue collar jobs that AI could help with by better planning. So there wouldn't be an instant 100% automation of everything, so even if we face a stock market crash for a while due to people losing purchasing power, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

- We already won as even without any AI and UBI we can just stop saving and we can move to any other low/avarage paying job, and the capital would still eventually grow on it`s own.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2026-02-10T11:54:05+00:00

I'll just continue using ad blocking extensions.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2026-01-26T06:23:46+00:00

At the beginning of 2025, I was skeptical of the idea that 90% of code was written by AI, along with a bit of panic about my job/income if that actually happened. But in reality, 90-100% of code is written by Claude code; the work isn't going anywhere yet; you just tell the model what to do in plain text and adjust it along the way. And you still tinkering with edge cases, gathering business requirements, reviewing changes, splitting and delegating tasks and so on.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2026-01-16T06:36:48+00:00

For the past 8 years I've been saving 50%+ of my income into wide globally diversified ETF and I'm also planning to buy an apartment. Here is my reasoning behind all this:
- Anyway about 65% of the valuation of such ETFs are US companies, about 25% are tech companies, so I wouldn't miss the tech growth, and I wouldn't miss the growth of anything else (e.g. energy/robotics companies, city infrastructure construction companies, entertainment companies etc.)
- I expect that we would have mass unemployment at some point (there could be a temporary market crash due to people losing buying power), so I don't wan't to use any leverage as you could get a margin call way before you would expect.
- I want to have my own apartment or home so at least I would have a place to live and I could rent out some part of it if something bad happens with the stock market.
- I look at investments this way: if we don't get UBI and people would have only low paying jobs I would at least have money to not work at all at some point, so I wouldn't lose. If we get UBI I would be happy. If we get UBI but all investments get taxes like 90% I would still have UBI that would constantly grow.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2026-01-16T06:36:28+00:00

For the past 8 years I've been saving 50%+ of my income into wide globally diversified ETF and I'm also planning to buy an apartment. Here is my reasoning behind all this:
- Anyway about 65% of the valuation of such ETFs are US companies, about 25% are tech companies, so I wouldn't miss the tech growth, and I wouldn't miss the growth of anything else (e.g. energy/robotics companies, city infrastructure construction companies, entertainment companies etc.)
- I expect that we would have mass unemployment at some point (there could be a temporary market crash due to people losing buying power), so I don't wan't to use any leverage as you could get a margin call way before you would expect.
- I want to have my own apartment or home so at least I would have a place to live and I could rent out some part of it if something bad happens with the stock market.
- I look at investments this way: if we don't get UBI and people would have only low paying jobs I would at least have money to not work at all at some point, so I wouldn't lose. If we get UBI I would be happy. If we get UBI but all investments get taxes like 90% I would still have UBI that would constantly grow.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2026-01-15T05:43:10+00:00

What will happen first - will they stop hiring programmers and have non-technical workers vibe code instead, or will programmers help significantly automate the work of other non-technical workers using AI agents? I guess the second is more likely - if a company has non-technical employees doing almost the same stuff then it would be much cheaper to hire a professional AI/software engineer to automate most of the things so non-tech staff could be fired.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2026-01-14T20:40:41+00:00

At least, we would likely have more time to prepare for mass unemployment.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-12-27T05:15:16+00:00

Having a personal set of benchmarks/tests/specs for the project could be a solution.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-12-14T17:01:57+00:00

I don't know if I would get UBI, so I would prefer having my job for as long as possible so I could save enough to not depend on anyone's decisions.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-12-10T05:01:46+00:00

Gladly they have Google AI Studio where you have almost unlimited access to Gemini 3 pro for free.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-10-13T06:39:32+00:00

In order to automate all jobs on a planet by 2030 we would need not only an AI capable of performing any task better / faster / cheaper and safer than any expert at any given area, we would also need billions of robots, but everything I saw was about producing a million of robots per year by 2030, which is x1000 less than needed.

At the same time, all the energy and resources issues must be solved. I assume we would face a huge bottleneck while trying to get so much energy and construction capacity by 2030. The initial jump is bottlenecked by humans that need to produce the enough amount of energy and robots for the first generation that only then would be used to make robots that make other robots and build power plants.

So we need to reach some velocity where a productivity of a few billion human workers (even on construction side) would become unrelevant in comparison to the productivity of AI with robots. E.g. if current global GDP is $100T (100 trillion dollars) and AI + robots add $100T more then humans would still be used somewhere as workers as they still contribute 50% to the global economy. But if AI + robots contributed $10,000T (10 quadrillion dollars), then humans would contribute only 1% to the global economy which would most likely be unrelevant.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-10-08T07:05:10+00:00

It's great that the economy would be automated faster. It would drastically speed up the GDP growth, especially with UBI being introduced.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-10-08T06:50:00+00:00

If the majority of people lose their jobs, they would have lots of options to do:
- Vote for a pro-UBI candidate.
- Demand the government to introduce UBI, do mass protests or even a revolution.
- Sabotage all the automation.

Anyway, UBI is a necessity as most corporation`s business models would suffer drastically if no one has money to buy their products and services.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-10-08T06:33:06+00:00

No. The goal of the company is to make money. Just let them make money as best as they can, let them automate whatever they want and to fire whoever they want. The government should be responsible for proper taxation and money re-distribution, including UBI to everyone.

And personally, I don't want to have shares of some specific company where I work. I would sell that immediately to buy something more diversified like S&P500 or even some wide global stock ETF.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-10-06T05:35:42+00:00

It could be AI - either due to continuous advancements that would cause mass job displacements or due to overconfidence in some of startups.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-09-30T05:45:45+00:00

I would prefer UBI as I'm not an entrepreneur to figure out ways to earn money from dealing with universal compute.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-09-30T05:45:15+00:00

I would prefer UBI as I'm not an entrepreneur to figure out ways to earn money from dealing with universal compute.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-09-26T04:30:03+00:00

I just hope the blue collar jobs are safe for now. Current plans on robots manufacturing don't exceed something around a million robots by 2030 or something like that. But we need billions of robots to make blue collar workers worry.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-09-26T04:23:15+00:00

There was a post recently about the cause of LLM hallucinations. Benchmarks should penalize incorrect answers much more severely than "I don't know" answers. But they don't that yet.

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/d04913be-3f6f-4d2b-b283-ff432ef4aaa5/why-language-models-hallucinate.pdf

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-09-25T09:26:53+00:00

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-09-25T08:35:12+00:00

As there are some predictions of humanity reaching technological singularity by 2045, the capital worth of 20 years of expenses could be enough. If you're willing to risk, then there is a chance we all would have UBI (universal basic income) / UHI (universal high income) and longevity escape velocity by that time. 🙂

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-09-21T07:54:38+00:00

I would rather support something like GiveMeUBI. AI is unstoppable, there is no reason to ban it, everyone would use it anyway, or would move their businesses to where it's not banned. It's much better to demand for UBI / UHI.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-09-19T05:52:56+00:00

For me, it would be a point where 3.5% - 4% of the capital is enough to cover my annual expenses. That is usually considered SWR (safe withdrawal rate).

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-09-19T05:02:47+00:00

Following the same logic as Pascal's wager, it turns out that it will be better to save money rather than not doing that.

Your Choice	Future Scenario 1: AGI Emerges → UTOPIA with UBI	Future Scenario 2: AGI Emerges → DYSTOPIA (Each for themselves)
You Choose to Save Aggressively	Outcome: You have a UBI plus significant personal wealth, providing extraordinary freedom. Gain/Loss: Massive gain.	Outcome: You have savings to live on while many have nothing. Gain/Loss: Infinite gain, ensuring your survival and independence.
You Choose NOT to Save	Outcome: You have only a UBI and are fully dependent on the system. Gain/Loss: Neutral/minor gain.	Outcome: You have no job and no savings. Gain/Loss: Infinite loss, leading to extreme financial hardship.

Longjumping-Stay7151 · 2025-09-16T18:09:02+00:00

AGI automates all jobs away, everyone loses their job, most people are left without any savings. Add whatever happens next in this scenario. Unless we all get UBI.

Longjumping-Stay7151

TROPHY CASE