CEOs and the working class are very divided on how AI will shake up the world. Leaders tout the promise of an enhanced work-life, while employees question the future of their jobs. The CEO of Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind, has a more abstract line of thinking: galaxy exploration and “superhumans”—and perhaps sooner than you may expect.
While AI agents, chatbots, and copilots are already outperforming human workers, it begs the question of whether advanced AGI models will usher in a jobs armageddon.
The DeepMind CEO hit back at that claim: “What generally tends to happen is new jobs are created that utilize new tools or technologies and are actually better,” he insisted. “We’ll have these incredible tools that supercharge our productivity and actually almost make us a little bit superhuman.”
“If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030.”
The DeepMind CEO is dead-set that advanced AI models will bring about a renaissance in human existence. The “golden era” is only five short years away.
“AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources,” Hassabis said.
However, Hassabis said he hasn’t personally witnessed much outcry about an AI jobs takeover. Instead, he purported that these new tools will turbocharge human productivity. Take healthcare, for example, he added that roles will be aided by AI, rather than replaced.
“There’s a lot of things that we won’t want to do with a machine,” he said. “You wouldn’t want a robot nurse—there’s something about the human empathy aspect of that care that’s particularly humanistic.”
Fortune reached out to DeepMind for comment.
“From this point forward…we will be managing not only human workers but also digital workers,” Benioff said during a panel at the event.
“Every job is going to change pretty radically, and I think many of them in the next year,” Hyams said, explaining that empathy will be a sought-after skill alongside “having a curiosity and an openness and maybe even a veracity to learn new things.”
