A scientist dubbed the ‘Godfather of AI’ said that artificial intelligence will make large companies more profitable than ever.
The catch is that unemployment will almost certainly rise to catastrophic levels, said Geoffrey Hinton, now a Nobel laureate in physics for his work on machine learning and artificial neural networks.
‘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.
‘It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.’
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 believes that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google — where he used to work as a computer scientists — are primarily developing AI models to chase ‘short-term profits’.
As of now, layoffs have not spiked, but there is mounting evidence that AI is shrinking the number of entry-level opportunities, making the job market that much harder to penetrate for recent college graduates.
A survey this week from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that companies using AI are more likely to retrain their employees than fire them, but not everything is expected to be rosy for the work force going forward.
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 has said that healthcare is a unique sector that won’t be affected by AI, even though the technology will certainly aid doctors and medical professionals in their jobs.
‘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.’
