2) I worked for a large private equity company on contract for a bit

If there’s a way to ensure I get paid, I’m willing to wager a lot of money that US unemployment will be less than 40% in Dec 2030.

Whoever makes an economical prediction more than 6 months into the future is BSing. I can build for you an analysis that forecasts <1% unemployment due to the huge growth of new companies that will need sales reps.

How did you factor in legislation changes to hit that 40% number? There's about 0% chance we hit 40% without that happening. So it would make no sense to not account for it. Meaning that 40% is after changes?

Our economy would have to be truly ridiculous if having robots do 40% of the work was a bad thing. I mean, that means we have almost twice as many people available to do the stuff that couldn’t get automated! The most obvious solution would just be for everyone to work a little bit more than half as hard as they used to.

I'll take the way under on that bet. Despite "software eating the world" there are currently protests in France about raising the retirement age. And we don't have enough workers in many industries (unemployment is at 3.5% in US). We're also facing a demographic cliff as baby boomers retire, so any automation we can get is desirable, in my opinion. But as the article mentions, robotics are far, far from replacing service industry jobs.