Artificial intelligence could flatten your company hierarchy, improve global agriculture, and give you the perfect vacation. It could also leave you permanently jobless, destroy your region’s economy, and cause mass social upset. Those high-stakes defined the mood as panelists at the third annual TIME100 AI Impact Dinner grappled with the dilemmas of machine intelligence in San Francisco on Monday night.
Chief among them: whether AI will cause mass job loss, a new jobs boom, or both at once. I don’t know what they’re doing right now, but I feel bad. Their job is just no longer needed.” He also outlined his company’s vision for AI travel agents that can organize your vacation to suit your preferences and reorganize it on the fly if weather or delays throw a spanner in the works.
Fogel was among the executives, innovators, storytellers, and activists gathered at the city’s Asian Art Museum to celebrate those honored in the 2026 TIME100 AI list, which highlights the year’s most influential people in AI. In an on-stage discussion before the dinner, TIME editor in chief Sam Jacobs asked panelists what trends they saw in the labor market — and how worried new graduates should be about their future. Whereas previous tech disruptions have shifted power upward in the corporate structure, he argued, AI could shift it downward: giving more power, capability, and control to everyday employees.
But, he added, “companies all over the world are still not doing that.” He advocated new taxes on companies that use AI to replace human workers, as a “temporary bridge” to a more stable future economy. Fogel warned of social unrest if governments don’t act now to limit the impact on people who cannot realistically retrain into AI-based careers. In the past it happened much slower,” he said.
Still, both men expressed skepticism about recent calls by U.S. AI workers and some executives to “pace the frontier” and slow down advanced research and development. If U.S. companies slow down but “bad actors” do not, Kumar S argued, “then you are in a much worse situation.” Fogel similarly warned that companies abroad — he did not name “China” — were “feverishly trying to develop similar technologies,” likening the problem to nuclear proliferation.
But AI’s potential isn’t all bad, the speakers agreed. Fellow panelist Doreen Bogdan-Martin, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, praised countries such as Canada and Rwanda for their investments in upskilling their populations. She added that AI-literate young people in the developing world are already creating “tremendous” new innovations in agriculture, early warning systems, healthcare, and education.
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