What’s more important? The advancement of technology? Or human rights?
I read a post recently from an old colleague from my venture capital days. Good guy, smart guy. What he said, though, has been itching at me for quite some time. His position was that the tech industry has a perception problem; while many in the industry see AI as a marvel being built for society, those outside it see it as something being done to them. The post called for insiders to listen more, to have empathy. On the surface, yes, of course we should listen more and have empathy. So why did this bother me?
A decade ago, tens of thousands of coal miners were displaced by the drive for clean energy. Coverage at the time was dismissive. Miners were expected to adapt; learn new skills from the multitude of free resources. It turned out retraining and reintegration into the workforce was much more difficult, and when BuzzFeed and HuffPo laid off departments full of journalists, the internet collectively retaliated, advising them to “learn to code”. Flash forward to 2026, and the number of people at risk of being displaced is not in the tens of thousands but in the millions.
AI now performs in the top 10% on bar exam simulations and answers roughly 90% of US medical licensing questions correctly. On SWE-Bench, AI systems jumped from solving only 4.4% of problems in 2023 to 71.7% in 2024. As of April 2026, the leading model scored 93.9%. [Codeant] Goldman Sachs estimates generative AI could automate the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs globally. In the US and Europe specifically, two-thirds of jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, with most exposed occupations having 25-50% of their workload replaceable. [Goldman Sachs] Research tracking displaced miners found earnings losses equivalent to 20% per year, with most failing to transition into new industries. The advice was to “learn to code”. Coding is now one of the jobs AI is eliminating the fastest. The magnitude of the problem is staggering.
Optimism and empathy are the “thoughts and prayers” of economic policy. Optimism is blind faith in outcomes no one is responsible for delivering, and empathy without action is indistinguishable from indifference. This posture is a permission slip to do nothing.
Several AI regulations have been proposed all over the world, but none of them address the problem head-on. Colorado’s AI Act and the EU AI Act try to put safeguards around AI bias affecting hiring and compensation. The Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law is focused on the behavior of AI and the information it disseminates; not with economic displacement nor the negative consequences of AI on social interactions and human development. RealPage, an “AI Revenue Management” company, shared private lease data from competing landlords to calculate optimized rental pricing recommendations, enabling landlords to price gouge renters. This was stopped not by any AI regulation but by classic anti-trust law designed to protect people.
Optimism and empathy breed complacency at a time when we need concrete solutions. We must push for laws written to protect human rights explicitly and for the enthusiastic enforcement of such laws; indirect regulations that limit AI only superficially address the problem. The decisions we make over the next few years will decide the fate of the next several generations of humanity. I can’t say that I have perfect solutions today, but what I can say is that as leaders we must make addressing this problem a genuine priority and not simply kick the can down the road. Empathy will not put food on anyone’s table.