A scientist dubbed the ‘Godfather of AI’ said that artificial intelligence will make large companies more profitable than ever.
Geoffrey Hinton, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to machine learning and artificial neural networks, warns that unemployment rates are likely to soar disastrously.
‘What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,’ Hinton said in an interview with the Financial Times.
‘AI is set to drive massive unemployment and significantly increase profits, making a small number of people wealthier while the majority become poorer. This issue stems from the capitalist system, not AI itself.’
Hinton, who won the Nobel prize last year, has been sounding the alarm on how AI has the possibility of wrecking the global economy if we let it.
He argues that organizations like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—his former employer—are primarily focusing on AI models to pursue ‘short-term gains’.
Currently, mass layoffs haven’t been observed, but growing evidence indicates AI is reducing entry-level job opportunities, complicating the job market for new graduates.
This week, a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York revealed that businesses using AI tend to retrain rather than dismiss employees, yet the future work environment may still be challenging.
Geoffery Hinton has predicted that the continual advancement of artificial intelligence will generate more profits than ever for companies
That will almost certainly come at the expense of workers, many of whom will lose their jobs as AI becomes able to replace them, he said
‘Layoffs and reductions in hiring plans due to AI use are expected to increase, especially for workers with a college degree,’ the survey said.
Hinton mentions that the healthcare sector stands out as it is unlikely to suffer from AI, although this technology will still support doctors and medical personnel in their roles.
‘If you could make doctors five times as efficient, we could all have five times as much health care for the same price,’ Hinton said on the Diary of a CEO YouTube series in June.
‘There’s almost no limit to how much health care people can absorb—[patients] always want more health care if there’s no cost to it.’
One way AI can make healthcare more efficient is simply by taking in huge volumes of information and learning from it faster than a human could ever hope to, he said.
‘They will be much better at reading medical images, for example,’ he said. ‘One of these things can look at millions of X-rays and learn from them. And a doctor can’t.’
But back in April, he made the terrifying prediction that AI has ‘a 10 to 20 percent chance’ of taking over and becoming smarter than humans.
In his interview with the Financial Times, Hinton rejected OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s solution to the jobs problem, which is paying people a universal basic income as AI begins supplant human labor.
Hinton said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s plan to give everyone a universal basic income won’t do anything to solve people’s lack of meaning in a system where everything is done by machines
He said it wouldn’t deal with the issue of ‘human dignity’, as many people derive meaning from their work.
Hinton also warned that AI could have disastrous geopolitical implications, possibly enabling non-state actors to build a bioweapon.
He lamented the Trump administration’s unwillingness to regulate AI more stringently, as China, he said, is taking the threat more seriously.
‘We don’t know what is going to happen, we have no idea, and people who tell you what is going to happen are just being silly,’ Hinton said.
‘We are at a point in history where something amazing is happening, and it may be amazingly good, and it may be amazingly bad. We can make guesses, but things aren’t going to stay like they are.’
