A reflection on leadership maturity, physical labor, and what happens when progress moves faster than our capacity to stay human.

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The human cost of AI is no longer an abstract idea to me.

I walked out of meeting yesterday with a feeling I couldn’t run from.
Nothing explosive happened. No one said anything cruel or untrue. There was no obvious moment to point to.

And still – something in me knew we’d crossed a line we couldn’t uncross.

I’ve been in rooms where conversations about AI, transformation, and “what’s next” move faster than leadership’s willingness to look at the system as a whole – and the human cost shows up anyway.

When Urgency Detaches from Responsibility

There was an urgency driving the room. Real urgency. The kind that sits heavy on your chest because you know the work matters and the consequences of not doing it land on the shoulders of real people.

But the way we were talking about that work didn’t match its weight.

The conversation kept lifting off the ground – into ideas, stories, possibilities – while the cost of what was being asked stayed firmly stuck in someone else’s body.

I lifted my head from my notes and looked directly into the eyes of one manager, seeing it on his face before he ever said a word.

Fear.

Not panic. Not confusion.

The kind of fear that comes when you’re being asked to solve something that cannot possibly solved the way it’s being framed – and you know you’ll be the carrying the fallout regardless.

If felt it in my own body as I watched him. A tightening. A kind of quiet dread.

When Sacrifice Gets Reframed as Opportunity

At one point, someone shared a story meant to inspire. A story about effort. About wanting something badly enough to bend your life around it. A story about grit.

We all nodded. Sickness in my stomach with each bow.

Because the role we were talking about wasn’t theoretical. It wasn’t aspirational. It wasn’t a stepping stone.

It was physical. On-site. On call. Dangerous in ways that don’t show up in org charts or development plans.

It asked for sleep disruption. Family disruption. Nervous system disruption.

And listening to it be discussed as something someone might “try,” or “do on the side,” or “use as a development experience” made something in me recoil hard.

Not because people shouldn’t stretch.

But because not all stretching is growth.

Some of it is displacement.

Some of it is leadership avoiding harder systemic decisions by reframing sacrifice as innovation.

Fear Acknowledged – and Then Set Aside

Later, someone mentioned a conversation they’d had with a long-tenured contractor. Fourteen years of work. Embedded. Reliable.

He was scared.

Scared enough to ask whether he should sell his house. Scared enough to say out loud that he didn’t know how to protect himself anymore.

The room acknowledged it. Briefly. A nod. A pause.

Then we moved on.

I sat there thinking about how easily fear can be spoken and still go nowhere. How it can be recognized without being integrated. How we can name harm and continue forward unchanged.

And something in me silenced.

Where the Human Cost of AI Becomes Visible

As more work becomes abstract – more digital, more flexible, more “learnable” – the work that cannot be abstracted starts to lose its voice, even as conversations about the human impact of AI at work continue to accelerate.

Work that still requires bodies.
Work that still requires human presence.
Work that still carries danger.

This is where the human cost of AI becomes visible – not because technology failed, but because leadership failed to stay present to the people asked to absorb the impact.

That work doesn’t disappear.

But the way we talk about it does.

And when that happens, dignity becomes fragile.

AI and the Dignity of Work

There is a kind of dignity that lives in necessary work. In showing up physically, day after day. In carrying responsibility that doesn’t scale or automate.

AI and the dignity of work collide most sharply when innovation is allowed to outrun responsibility – when systems advance without staying with the human cost they create.

When that dignity gets treated as flexible – as something interchangeable or temporary – something essential breaks.

Not all at once.
Quietly.

It shows up as fear that no one knows what to do with. In managers holding impossible expectations. In people wondering how much longer they can do this.

It shows up in rooms where urgency is real but responsibility is diffused.

Leadership, AI, and the Refusal to Look Away

I don’t have a neat ending for this.
I’m not trying to make a point.
I’m writing because I can’t unknow what I felt in that room – and I don’t want to be talked out of it.

I don’t want to live in a world where we keep calling this progress while quietly asking some people to absorb more danger, more instability, more sacrifice – without naming the cost.

I don’t want fear to become background noise.

And I don’t want dignity to be treated as negotiable.

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I’m still inside this. Processing. Feeling my way through it.

But, I know this much:

When systems move faster than leadership’s capacity to integrate consequence – when innovation becomes a substitute for responsibility – something vital starts to slip away.

AI didn’t cause that. It only revealed it.

If you’ve felt that slipping too, you’re not alone.

And you’re not wrong to pause when it fills your stomach with the warning to pay attention.