Last year, the takeaway from all the HITEC AI sessions was, “You won't be replaced by AI, you'll be replaced by someone using AI.” But what hides under that statement is the fact that 10 of you will be replaced by one person using AI – still a net negative of nine jobs. These jobs previously were held by educated, but perhaps more junior people. People who invested a great deal of time and money getting a college degree and are eager to start learning how to function in the business world.

There are several problems already with AI. There is moral frustration over the fact that AI is trained on all art and writing of others without attribution or compensation. I can read Shakespeare and produce writing inspired by it, or see a painting and then paint something similar.

When a human does that, there is less concern if it isn't a direct copy. I'm extremely frustrated — even annoyed — by the AI slop that is permeating every aspect of our attention, from the obviously AI-written posts on LinkedIn and the inauthenticity (and laziness) it conveys to the deep fakes and sheer volume of poorly written SaaS applications. Slightly more concerning is the power consumption of these data centers and what that means for energy prices. I recommend you familiarize yourself
with the massive amount of energy your questions require.

Quite a bit more concerning is the loss of human ability to think, to struggle, to fail and to improve through hard work. AI companions are on the rise, and there is no shortage of examples on how this can go wrong. And are we really OK that such a large number of AI executives and creators estimate between 5% and 20% chance that AI leads to human extinction? Would you buy a dishwasher that had a 20% chance of blowing up your neighborhood? How about a 5% chance? While those examples are important and concerning, they are for another discussion. What triggered me to write this column is that we’re already seeing the first signs of an eventuality that will affect us all.

A study of payroll data from Stanford shows that 13% of junior jobs in AI-impacted areas are already gone. The data they looked at is from almost a year ago, and that number is almost certainly climbing. Companies are realizing they can use agents for junior-level tasks already, for cheaper.

To executives and shareholders, this sounds great on the surface, but the problem is that you have a generation of people fresh in the workforce who need the real-world experience that your mid-level and senior employees have earned through years of working. The study shows that more senior-level jobs are on the rise due to AI, but we must still consider that with these junior jobs going away, this heralds the end of cognitive mobility in those positions that require real-world experience to develop. And that is before we even get into the reality that AI agents will start replacing mid-level and senior employees as well. It’s likely the latter will happen in a shorter period than it would take those junior-level and mid-level employees to develop ahead of this curve. Multiply this across every cognitive industry, then add the quickly following intelligent robots also benefiting from this increase in AI capabilities.

A common response is that technology has always replaced jobs, but from that technology new industry has risen and created new jobs. But this isn’t the same as farmers being replaced by a harvester, or human computers being replaced by silicon computers. This is different because just one branch of AI (LLMs) is already capable of replacing many different cognitive jobs. It's something that can (and does already) improve itself, and its abilities are growing rapidly. Just looking at the improvements from ChatGPT 3 to Gemini 3 Pro, in such a short period of time, should make it clear the trajectory we're on. Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus refers to AI as a wave of digital immigrants with genius-level ability who can work nonstop and for pennies on the dollar.

It’s important to consider that these “digital immigrants” are taking high-paying knowledge jobs already, and this is only going to increase.

You can see this is bad for humanity, but I want to highlight that this is really bad for the hospitality industry.

These are our customers losing their jobs. If the higher-paying cognitive jobs that they were previously doing are unavailable, or are replaced by lower-paying jobs, what impact will this have on their ability to travel, dine out and enjoy our hotels and resorts? As workforces reduce, what will that do to business travel?

As AI begins solving its own technical and integration problems, what does that do to hospitality technology conferences?

This is a real problem, and even the people building these AI companies realize it and are trying to reassure us. According to AI leaders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman, there will be so much abundance due to AI that everyone will have universal basic or even high income.

But who will pay for this, especially in the transition years? What motivates one country’s (radically altruistic) AI company to pay for the entire world's abundance should their product automate away another country’s cognitive jobs? When in the history of humanity have we seen examples of this going well? Will countries and governments even exist? This is also a great philosophical discussion for another time.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as the Last Capitalist in Cixin Liu’s, "For the Benefit of Mankind" (quite an interesting dystopian take on extreme runaway capitalism). Maybe we'll indeed find a utopia where there is so much abundance that people will be free and unencumbered to pursue all the things the world has to offer. If this is the case, our industry will be even more important than it is now as people pursue human experiences and search to find their purpose in the real world.

Whatever your personal perspective on AI – and I'm very pro-AI –we need to talk about this. We can’t just hope things will work out. If we don’t take action to protect the ability for humanity to have purpose, and to have enough resources to thrive and travel, we’ll certainly be giving back those AI automation savings in the form of reduced occupancy.