At the Forbes AI 50 affair in San Francisco this week, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie was on hand mixing it up with some of the hottest AI unicorns of the year. A list which includes Anthropic, Cohere, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Figure AI, Glean, Harvey, Hugging Face, Midjourney, Mistral AI, Notion, OpenAI, Perplexity, Runway, Scale AI, Synthesia, Thinking Machine Labs, Writer and XAI–companies rapidly accelerating AI adoption.
As I moved through the crowd, congratulating the honorees, I asked: “As people start to live to 100 years and beyond, what are they going to do with the rest of their lives? And more importantly, how will they afford it, especially as companies, like Shopify and Duolingo, transition to AI-first and begin opting for AI output over human talent.
Karen Lee, chief marketing officer of Mayfield Fund, said she’s given a lot of thought to longevity and what it means.
“There’s lifespan, there’s health span, and then there’s career span,” she said, explaining that people will likely start extending their careers in sections.
“Instead of feeling like you have just one career trajectory, why not have two or three and do things that are wildly different from one another. Things that maybe you didn’t have time to do in your first career, you can now apply in your second, leveraging the relationships that you have, the creative energy you can give back to the community,” she said. “AI will compliment and allow people to venture down different career paths that they may never have explored otherwise.”
Alan Ghelberg, chief financial officer of Harvey, a legal AI startup that just raised $300 million at a $500 billion valuation, had similar thoughts.
“I think there’s going to be a lot more time to create new things in day-to-day life. More time for fitness and family as well.” And if we live even longer, we’ll get to be wiser over a longer period of time, he added.
Meanwhile Gen Z is burning out on the daily grind and has started to master the art of micro-retirements where mental health gap years are being taken to recharge and reassess the market to find work that can be meaningful and rewarding as AI reshapes the economy. Challenging the traditional notion of continuous work until retirement age, they are leaning into work-life balance with the perspective that they can work until they die as long as they get to take frequent breaks.
And they’re future-proofing themselves with physical skills that AI and robotics have yet to master, like going into the skilled trades of construction, electrical and plumbing that require a level of dexterity that robots do not yet have.
However, with Forbes AI 50 honoree Figure AI’s stated goal to build robots that can do any job humans can do, as AI optimizes to fill any role it can, humans need not apply. Even Equinox has started to replace massage therapists with Aescape’s massage robot. So where does that leave the rest of us–training to become ballet dancers?
Randall Lane, chief creative officer of Forbes and creator of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, addressed the room of Forbes AI 50 honorees. “If you look at the assembly line, mainframe computers, personal computers, even the Internet, even mobile smartphones, you didn’t know you were in that era of incredible societal change and business change until a few years after,” he said. This is the first time in human history that we know in real time that we are creating disruptive technological change as it happens.
“This is a very potent technology,” he told me. “We have to be optimistic. It’s going to give productivity, create new jobs. And I think what we’re going to figure out next is how we create a better world from this–instead of a dangerous one.”
