In 2026, most of your long-term financial risk comes from your job being automated, which will plausibly happen in the next 5 years. If this happens, your salary will go to zero while the S&P 500 will probably at least double (assuming no AI takeover)
I’m not sure this is true. In a scenario featuring widespread automation of white collar work, you’re going to have all kinds of churn in the economy and it’s really unclear how that translates into stock market winners and losers. Many people seem to assume that the big winners will be incumbent tech giants, in which case, yea, the S&P 500 will go way up. But big economic changes are often good for upstarts rather than incumbents, and it’s worth pointing out that all the frontier labs today other than Google are a) privately held and b) relatively recently founded. The profits from automating your job might well flow to some startup that doesn’t even exist yet, and that same startup might kill off the giants of the S&P.
I’m not sure this is true. In a scenario featuring widespread automation of white collar work, you’re going to have all kinds of churn in the economy and it’s really unclear how that translates into stock market winners and losers. Many people seem to assume that the big winners will be incumbent tech giants, in which case, yea, the S&P 500 will go way up. But big economic changes are often good for upstarts rather than incumbents, and it’s worth pointing out that all the frontier labs today other than Google are a) privately held and b) relatively recently founded. The profits from automating your job might well flow to some startup that doesn’t even exist yet, and that same startup might kill off the giants of the S&P.