Shawn Wang
Works on AI developer tooling, and on Software Unscripted treats AI job risk as an asymmetric bet rather than a prediction.
“I'm on record as like a 95% doomer, where I'm like, the default path we should assume is that this all goes wrong…”
Software Unscripted · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · May 2026
Wang and his host had been arguing about whether AI eliminates jobs the way automation was supposed to eliminate radiologists, and had just agreed that radiology did not die. Wang's framing here is asymmetric risk rather than prediction: he says being wrong and unprepared is negative infinity on the risk-reward matrix. It comes from someone who works on AI developer tooling for a living.
Transcript
…And, like, isn't that nice? Like, like, uh, you know, the ultimate reality of abundance is that everyone just has a basic living wage, uh, universal basic income, and they can live their lives, have fun with their kids, touch grass, while the robots work for you. Why are you so scared of this?
Yeah, I mean, that is certainly one way it could play out. And then there's also, you know, the Skynet kills everybody, you know, and we're all paperclips. I do, yeah.
I also, I am also, I'm on record as like a 95% doomer, where I'm like, the default path we should assume is that this all goes wrong because, you know, the risk reward is that we should assume it goes wrong because the other, like, the situation where it is that we're wrong and it does go wrong and we were not prepared for it is a fatality, right? Like, it's, it's like in negative infinity in terms of our risk reward matrix.
Yeah, I have an unusual take on that, maybe, which is not something I've heard other people say, which is that it seems to me that the history of human disasters is that the way that we prevent mega disasters is that we have a smaller disaster that's still really bad. Yes.
But
not a complete Armageddon. Where does