Last week, Las Vegas played host to a different kind of gamble, with bets placed not on the blackjack tables but on AI’s future. At the inaugural HumanX conference, thousands of tech luminaries flew in from Silicon Valley and beyond to ponder whether AI is more sinner or saint, while sipping coffee and leaning in close to scan badges to connect.
Billed as the world’s most important AI conference, HumanX pulled in heavy hitters from OpenAI, Snowflake, Meta, Anthropic, and Airbnb. Even former Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage, professing her undying love for Doritos while discussing consumer behavior.
On Sunday night, the crowd gathered for a highly anticipated cook-off between a chef and AI. When the chef fell ill, the crowd held its breath, wondering if machine beats man by default. Instead, the audience was treated to something arguably more poetic: a magic show, where the wonder of sleight of hand, a watch stolen right before your eyes, and some light mind reading reminded us the unexpectedness of the human experience is something that AI could never quite replace.
Immune to illness and fatigue, AI does have its advantages. But the week’s discussions kept returning to a bigger question: Will AI replace human workers, or create new opportunities for them? What’s the role for humans amid the magic of AI?
Throughout the conference, speakers consistently made the case that history suggests reinvention, not extinction — that while AI will automate certain jobs, it will also create new ones we’re not even aware exist yet. The printing press didn’t eliminate scribes; it created the publishing industry. Electricity didn’t make factory workers obsolete; it birthed telecommunications. And even the Industrial Revolution inspired a cultural movement of nonconformist art.
A decade ago, we couldn’t imagine “social media influencer” or “prompt engineer” to be a career, just as we can’t even begin to speculate what else may come next.
On Monday evening, as attendees returned to the center stage—champagne glasses in hand, courtesy of a woman in a dress adorned with flutes—all eyes turned to OpenAI’s Kevin Weil. Addressing concerns about AI replacing creatives, he argued that fears about tools like video models are misdirected: “It’s [not] as if someone’s going to snap their fingers, say ‘Make me a blockbuster,’ and be done.”
In other words, it will still be up to humans to collaborate in step with AI. While someday we may have algorithmic ethicists and technicians for laundry-folding robots, what’s certain is that the nature of work is already changing. Adaptation — whether it’s in finance, entertainment, or from cook-off to magic show — will be key to preserving our roles in an increasingly automated future.
As main-stage speakers continued discussions on creative workflows, feedback loops, and synthetic data, different conversations were taking place in the sessions on the outskirts of the conference floor — ones that challenged the dynamics of AI and human connection, the role of AI for good, and whether it really all comes down to profit.
In one roundtable, attendees debated AI’s role in shaping human relationships, from algorithmic matchmaking for networking to AI-powered scheduling with busy friends. In another session, a group of panelists concluded society needs to first determine its collective values before understanding how to build AI for the public interest, and that aligning company and consumer incentive first begins with changing which technology we celebrate.
The theme, whether in keynotes or behind closed doors, was clear: What will responsible AI look like, in theory and in practice? How do we trust what we’re still learning how to build and understand? And how do we define trust, anyway?
AI is accelerating, whether we regulate it or not, and everyone—from policy makers to product managers—is scrambling to keep up. As attendees, weary from after-hours networking, filed out of the Fontainebleau once the conference wound down, a final question still lingered in the Vegas air: Does what happen in AI stay in AI? Or will it rewrite the human experience altogether?
