I hate writing this post.
Not because it’s about a company I dislike.
Quite the opposite.
I’ve admired the company for years, and I’m even lucky enough to call one of its founders a friend. Many years ago, when my first book had just come out and funding rounds were still relatively rare, he even contributed a few pages to it.
That’s exactly why I won’t name the company.
Because, ultimately, this post isn’t really about _ _ _ _.
It’s about a question that has been bothering me for years.
Whenever I interview founders and CEOs, sooner or later I end up asking some version of the same thing:
“Tell me the truth. Are you building AI to expand human potential… or to reduce the need for humans?”
The answer is always reassuring: AI removes repetitive work, frees people to spend more time on more human tasks, doesn’t replace people but enhances them, makes them more effective, and so on.
And, to be fair, I think most of the people who said those things genuinely believed them.
Then I read stories like this one.
A successful company. Growing. Well funded. Widely respected.
Announcing a significant reduction in headcount while explaining that AI is “fundamentally changing the economics of hospitality.”
This isn’t a criticism of that decision.
I don’t know the numbers, the internal dynamics, or the strategic reasoning behind it.
What interests me is something much bigger:
the stories we keep telling ourselves.
Over the past decade, every major technological transition has been framed almost as a moral victory.
“Automation as Liberation.”
Reducing workload as though that automatically meant improving work.
But the morality of technology depends entirely on the incentives of the system in which it operates.
And, incidentally, as I write this, it’s Mark Fisher’s birthday.
Rest in Punk, mate.
In Capitalist Realism, Fisher wrote that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
Many people read that line as an observation about economics.
But if you’ve actually read the book — and you should, if you haven’t — you know it’s really a meditation on imagination.
Fisher’s point is that capitalism became so pervasive that it stopped feeling like one possible way of organizing reality and started feeling like Reality itself.
We lost the ability to imagine alternatives.
Sometimes I wonder whether AI is producing the same effect.
It’s what I call AI Realism:
we have stopped imagining futures in which automation is not inevitable.
If something can be automated, sooner or later it will be.
The only questions left are:
How fast?
By whom?
And who captures the value?
Everything else — everyone else — becomes collateral damage.
Perhaps that’s also why we feel so comfortable talking about “empowering people,” but so uncomfortable admitting that some of those same people — like that 15% being laid off — may simply disappear from the equation.
To paraphrase Fisher, perhaps it’s becoming easier to imagine hospitality without workers…
than hospitality without work.
What do you think?
See you next week,
SIMONE PUORTO
