Last year, I undertook to summit Mount Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America. It was an arduous climb, beset by harsh conditions that pushed me to my physical and mental limits and nearly beyond. A colleague later described the experience as “an ego death,” which ultimately awakened a profound sense of meaning and a deeper commitment to my values.
Now, I’m wondering whether the rapid growth of AI may be creating collective anxieties analogous to my “crisis” on the mountain, threatening one’s sense of agency and even one’s identity as a capable, cognizant human being. For founders and investors, AI represents exponential leverage. But when intelligence becomes abundant, it also generates a significant degree of uncertainty about the future—and one’s place in it.
In a recent Fortune article, futurist Bernard Marr, the author of “Generative AI in Practice,” discussed the cluster of unknowns surrounding AI and noted our biggest fears: Impact on Jobs, Environmental Harm, Surveillance, Weaponization, Intellectual Property Theft, Misinformation, and that AI will develop the power to maliciously harm us.1
Perhaps our most immediate fear is that multitudes of workers will be supplanted by machines. The roles with repeatable workflow, such as call center, drive through, and trucking jobs, appear most exposed. In white-collar roles, junior programmers, entry level finance and legal professionals, technical writers, and graphic designers are among those being replaced. In some cases, workers are training the systems that will replace them. Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, has suggested “AI could eliminate about half of all entry-level jobs in white-collar industries within the next five years.2 A structural shift founders and allocators cannot ignore.
Thus far, however, AI remains incapable of true creativity, critical thinking, or complex problem-solving; it lacks human-like empathy or compassion. Thus, this “crisis” may be an opportunity to reimagine our place in the world and to find purpose and meaning in productive ways that AI cannot yet replicate.
In a lengthy essay entitled Machines of Loving Grace, Dario Amodei wrote that he believes that “human purpose does not depend on being the best in the world at something, and humans can find purpose…through stories and projects that they love. We simply need to break the link between the generation of economic value and self-worth and meaning. But that is a transition society has to make, and there is always the risk we don’t handle it well.”3
For those building and backing companies, AI will demand a new strategy, a quieter ego and a clearer vision on what will make a company endure.
- forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2025/08/18/7-terrifying-ai-risks-that-could-change-the-world/
- theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/feb/17/ai-startups-work-culture-san-francisco
- darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology