Pioneering computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, whose work has earned him a Nobel Prize and the moniker “godfather of AI,” said artificial intelligence will spark a surge in unemployment and profits.
“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said. “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.”
Still, Hinton believes that jobs that perform mundane tasks will be taken over by AI, while sparing some jobs that require a high level of skill.
In his interview with the FT, he also dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s idea to pay a universal basic income as AI disrupts the economy and reduce demand for workers, saying it “won’t deal with human dignity” and the value people derive from having jobs.
In his view, the dangers of AI fall into two categories: the risk the technology itself poses to the future of humanity, and the consequences of AI being manipulated by people with bad intent.
In his FT interview, he warned AI could help someone build a bioweapon and lamented the Trump administration’s unwillingness to regulate AI more closely, while China is taking the threat more seriously. But he also acknowledged potential upside from AI amid its immense possibilities and uncertainties.
“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.”
Meanwhile, he told the FT how he uses AI in his own life, saying OpenAI’s ChatGPT is his product of choice. While he mostly uses the chatbot for research, Hinton revealed that a former girlfriend used ChatGPT “to tell me what a rat I was” during their breakup.
“She got the chatbot to explain how awful my behavior was and gave it to me. I didn’t think I had been a rat, so it didn’t make me feel too bad . . . I met somebody I liked more, you know how it goes,” he quipped.
Hinton also explained why he left Google in 2023. While media reports have said he quit so he could speak more freely about the dangers of AI, the 77-year-old Nobel laureate denied that was the reason.
