A single advertisement at the entrance of San Francisco’s Moscone Center South said what nobody on stage wanted to: “Stop hiring humans.”
It was April 2026, and HumanX — the four-day conference drawing 6,500 investors, entrepreneurs, and tech executives — had an elephant in the room. AI was eating jobs, and the people building it knew it.
The Panic Is Real
May Habib, chief executive of AI platform Writer, didn’t mince words on the main stage. Fortune 500 bosses are having a “collective panic attack” about AI and employment, she told the audience.
The anxiety is well-founded. Companies are now directly citing AI when announcing job cuts — no longer dressing layoffs up as restructuring or strategic pivots.
Salesforce laid off 4,000 customer support workers, saying AI now handles 50 per cent of its support conversations. Block chief Jack Dorsey announced plans to cut headcount nearly in half, citing “intelligence tools” that have fundamentally changed how companies operate.
Not everyone buys the narrative. Some economists argue firms are pointing to AI to rationalise layoffs that are really about past overhiring or cost-cutting ahead of massive infrastructure investments. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has spoken of “AI-washing” — slapping an AI label on cuts that would have happened anyway.
Andrew Ng vs Jensen Huang: The Coding Debate
Two years ago, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang declared the ultimate goal was to make it so “nobody has to programme.”
Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning.AI, wasn’t having it.
“We will look back on that as some of the worst career advice ever given,” Ng shot back during his HumanX session.
In Ng’s view, coding is not an obsolete skill — AI has simply made it available to more people. The tool changes, the craft endures.
It’s a debate that cuts to the heart of how workers should prepare. If Huang is right, millions of developers need to reinvent themselves. If Ng is right, they need to adapt, not abandon.
The Humanities Play
A new argument has taken hold in Silicon Valley: interpersonal skills will become more valuable than ever, with some voices going so far as to tout a humanities education as sound tech career preparation.
Greg Hart, chief executive of Coursera, reported that enrollment in critical thinking courses has tripled over the past year. “As AI can do more of a job, the things that will distinguish and differentiate a given employee are going to be the human skills — critical thinking, communication, teamwork,” he said.
Florian Douetteau, chief executive of Dataiku, agreed. The real human added value, he told AFP, is the “capacity for judgment.”
He described a world where an AI agent works through the night, the human counterpart reviews results in the morning, and the agent resumes during the lunch break. Efficient, yes. But the entrepreneur expressed unease.
“We are going to have a generation of people who will never have written anything from start to finish in their entire lives,” he said. “That’s pretty unsettling.”
Al Gore’s Warning
Former US vice president Al Gore was the week’s lone genuinely dissenting voice — and he didn’t hold back.
“We should be preparing for the loss of knowledge work jobs in a number of categories,” Gore warned.
He called for a real action plan to map threatened jobs and prepare workers for career transitions, drawing a direct parallel with the deindustrialisation that followed the offshoring wave of the 2000s.
“The mistake was not globalisation. The mistake was in not preparing for the consequences of globalisation,” Gore said.
“Maybe we don’t want to talk about it, because it may slow down the enthusiasm for the technology.”
The comment hung in the air. For a conference built on enthusiasm, it was an uncomfortable truth.
The Entry-Level Crisis
All the advice about leaning into humanity risks ringing hollow for a generation already struggling to land a first job.
AI has automated entry-level tasks that once served as on-the-job training. Hiring of candidates with less than one year of experience fell 50 per cent between 2019 and 2024 among America’s major tech companies, according to a study by investment fund SignalFire.
If you can’t get hired to learn, and AI handles the learning tasks anyway, where exactly does a career begin?
Amazon Web Services chief Matt Garman summed up the industry line: AI is going to “transform every single company, every single job, every single way that we do work.”
The question HumanX couldn’t answer: transform into what?
What It Means
HumanX 2026 revealed a Silicon Valley no longer able to maintain its confident narrative. The “Stop hiring humans” ad at the entrance was intended as provocative marketing. Instead, it became the conference’s defining image.
The industry is caught between selling AI as a productivity multiplier and confronting the displacement it causes. Gore’s comparison to globalisation is apt — the technology will reshape economies regardless of whether anyone prepares for the fallout. Last time, we didn’t. The question is whether this time will be different.
For workers watching the debate, the signals are clear: adapt fast, build human skills, and don’t wait for the industry to plan your transition for you.
SOURCES
- Channel News Asia / AFP — “‘Stop hiring humans’? Silicon Valley confronts AI job panic”
- SignalFire — Hiring data for tech workers with less than 1 year experience (2019-2024)
