We are overdue for a new Pascal’s Wager. If intelligence really is on an exponential curve with no ceiling, betting against it is the risky move. The upside is too massive, the downside of preparation is almost zero, and every signal points to acceleration, not a bubble.

What Pascal’s Wager Looks Like in 2025

Pascal’s original wager was simple: if belief in something world-changing carries infinite upside and minimal downside, rational people choose belief. The modern version is not theological. It is practical. If AI truly compounds in capability, the smartest position is to behave as if we are headed toward AGI, superintelligence, or whatever you consider the next force multiplier. You reorganize your career, your skills, your workflows, and your teams around that trajectory.

The alternative is treating AI like a fad. That is a bet that history will not reward.

The Most Important Curve Nobody’s Arguing About

Benchmarks are noisy. Leaderboards are gamed. A new metric cuts through the noise: how long an AI agent can work on a task without human intervention.

Benjamin Todd highlighted it recently, and it is the cleanest signal I have seen. Forget whether Model X scored one point higher than Model Y on some arcane reasoning test. What matters is uninterrupted runtime.

  • 2023: 15 minutes of unattended work felt impressive.
  • Early 2024: 30 minutes meant the agent could finish a short project while you were on a call.
  • Late 2024: 60 minutes became the new baseline.
  • 2025: The curve shows a doubling roughly every five to seven months.

If the trend continues, we are staring at 4-hour, 8-hour, 16-hour, even 32-hour autonomous cycles in the near term. That is not a thought experiment. It is a calendar reminder.

METR runtime chart

Source: METR, “Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks.”

What Happens When Agents Work a Full Shift

Four hours of uninterrupted execution means you wake up to finished drafts, QA’d reports, coded prototypes, or cleaned datasets. Eight hours means the agent worked an entire human shift while you slept. Sixteen hours means you hand off once a day, review once, and the rest of the process stays in continuous motion. Thirty-two hours means your digital colleague spans time zones without handoff friction.

This is the lever that flips AI from assistant to co-worker:

  • Velocity: Projects compress from weeks to days because the downtime disappears.
  • Quality: Iteration loops multiply. The agent can test, refine, and triage while you strategize.
  • Trust: When you can rely on an AI to stay on task for eight hours, you start assigning higher-stakes work. That changes headcount math, operating models, and client expectations.
  • Compounding: Every additional uninterrupted hour adds more knowledge back into the system. It fine-tunes the agent’s context, expands the training corpus, and sharpens its judgment.

This is the underlying fact that anchors my wager. Once agents stay on task longer than a human shift, the economy reorganizes around them.

How I’m Placing My Bet

I am acting as if the uninterrupted-runtime curve holds. That means:

  • Personal: Daily reps with the latest agents so I can route work without friction, track their failure modes, and understand where human judgment still dominates.
  • Professional: Designing engagements where clients see agentic runtime as a KPI, not just cost-per-call or seat licenses. We measure how long the AI can safely operate solo and we build governance that scales with it.
  • Skills: Prioritizing orchestration, evaluation, and context engineering. Every hour I invest here multiplies as runtime extends. Model literacy matters, but routing and guardrails win the decade.
  • Public Safety: In justice, CJIS, and government modernization, uninterrupted runtime is not an optional metric. It is how we decide which processes can move to AI-first operations without compromising compliance or community trust.

I am not chasing the hype cycles. I am aligning to the metric that predicts when this technology crosses from tool to teammate.

The Wager You Have to Choose

You can sit out this wager and hope the curve flattens. Maybe uninterrupted runtime hits a wall. Maybe hardware ceilings or regulatory brakes slow it down.

If the curve holds, and every data point says it will, you will want to be the person, the team, the agency that placed the bet early. The cost of preparation is low. The upside of being ready for eight-hour agents is enormous. The downside of being surprised by them is existential.

This is our Pascal’s Wager moment. Choose the timeline you want to live on, and start building for it now.