“If you could make doctors five times as efficient, we could all have five times as much health care for the same price,” he continued. “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.”
The Nobel Prize–winning scientist is one of many experts who anticipate that health care will be buoyed in this digital transformation—but many others won’t be so lucky.
“There are jobs where you can make a person with an AI assistant much more efficient, and you won’t lead to less people, because you’ll just have much more of that being done,” Hinton said. “But most jobs are not like that.”
He concluded that AI will likely lead to companies needing far fewer workers and that the new technology’s impact can’t be compared to previous technological advances that created an explosion of new jobs.
“This is a very different kind of technology. If it can do all mundane human intellectual labor, then what new jobs is it going to create?” Hinton said. “You’d have to be very skilled to have a job that it couldn’t just do.”
