People are now making wagers on when the Singularity will kick off

And so, it has come to this…

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely…

I know the next two to five years are going to be disorienting in ways most people aren’t prepared for. This is already happening in my world. It’s coming to yours. I know the people who will come out of this best are the ones who start engaging now — not with fear, but with curiosity and a sense of urgency.
Matt Shumer, 11/2/26

I think that we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks. So white-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.
Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI CEO, 13/2/26

OK, that headline is a little clickbaitish. But only a little.

Substack, or at least my little corner of it, has been aflame in recent days over a wager one high-profile Substacker recently proposed to another.

Freddie deBoer is one of the few remaining AI sceptics. The tl;dr of his argument is that people keep going on about how transformative AI is, but it’s yet to transform very much – and probably won’t do so.

Freddie is very much in the ‘AI is just a glorified stochastic parrot/next-token predictor’ camp.

Here’s the gauntlet he’s now thrown down:

There are several different kinds of AI psychosis going on right now. The big one is, well, everyone has lost their fucking minds about AI, in a way I find truly disturbing…

So rather than continuing to make the same points about AI, I’m going to try and get a little juice by offering Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten a bet. Scott is an AI enthusiast, a signatory of the AGI 2027 thing…

So I’m here to bet Scott $5,000 that AI will not meaningfully disrupt the economy in the next three years… I’m offering a wager to Scott that the economy will remain basically “normal” through February 2029.

The new normal
As the great man himself might point out, normal is doing a lot of work in the sentence above. By normal, Freddie means, among many other metrics:

· The U.S. unemployment rate is equal to or lower than 18%

· Professional and Business Services” employment, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has not declined by more than 35% from February 2026

· Median household income has not fallen by more than 40% relative to mean household income

What will it mean if Freddie loses the bet, other than he’s out five large?

If Professional and Business Services employment has declined by 35 per cent-plus and, as a result, the unemployment rate is 18 per cent-plus – all within the next three years – that would seem to suggest AI has become as capable as most, possibly all, cognitively elite white-collar workers.

I just asked ChatGPT how much further AI needs to progress before we're in Singularity territory. It told me, “When AI can autonomously improve itself (research, code, deploy), outperform humans across most economically valuable tasks, and scale safely and reliably with minimal human oversight – triggering sustained, compounding capability gains.

When I drilled down into the “outperform humans” part of the response, my all-knowing digital overlord noted, “Mass white-collar redundancy from AI would be consistent with early Singularity dynamics. But it could also be ‘just’ a huge technological transition (like electrification) without runaway self-improvement.”

The big gamble
Alexander has accepted deBoer’s wager, though only on the condition the timeframe is extended:

My median for AGI is more like early 2030s, and it might take a few years to have effects this profound on the economy. If you want to make the same bet for 2036, I’m game.

It may be that Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Yoshua Bengino, Demis Hassabis, Jensen Huang, Geoffrey Hinton, Elon Musk, Matt Shumer, Mustafa Suleyman and I are all suffering from AI psychosis.

But it’s worth considering the possibility our analysis is correct and that the world will soon be turned upside down.

There have been plenty of revolutionary technological changes over the last century or two. But none involved infusing inanimate machines with something roughly equivalent to human intelligence. AI is the first technology that can be cloned at scale to do cognitive labour, shipped instantly and plugged into almost any business process.

Maybe we still have a few years to prepare for what’s coming, but maybe we don’t.

This would seem to be one of those scenarios where it’s best to err on the side of caution and start preparing ASAP.

Whether the looming tipping point is one, three, five or 10 years away.