Godfather of AI warns rich people will use AI to replace workers: ‘Going to create massive unemployment…’
Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton has warned that rich people will soon use AI to replace workers, which could trigger a massive unemployment scenario while leading to a rise in profits for massive corporations.
In an interaction with Financial Times, Hinton said, “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,”
“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,” he added.
Hinton is among the pioneering figures in the AI industry and has experience working at Google for over a decade until he left the company in 2023 to speak more freely about the dangers of AI.
For his work in enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks, Hinton was also awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2024. A 1986 paper co-authored by him also remains one of the most highly cited and popularized a crucial method for training multilayer neural networks. His multiple contributions in the field have also earned him the title of “Godfather of AI.”
Godfather of AI rejects Sam Altman’s idea:
Hinton also disagreed with a previous idea suggested by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, among others, that as the labour markets become too small there could be a need by governments to introduce a universal basic income.
The 77-year-old noted that the solution “won’t deal with human dignity” since people get worth from their jobs.
“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,” he adds. “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.”
Hinton on the “only hope” for humanity:
Hinton also repeated his previous assertion that there is a need to add maternal instincts to AI chatbots for humanity to survive in the future.
“When the assistant is much smarter than you, how are you going to retain that power? There is only one example we know of a much more intelligent being controlled by a much less intelligent being, and that is a mother and baby… If babies couldn’t control their mothers, they would die,” he stated.
He also noted that “the only hope” for humanity is engineering AI such that it becomes mothers to us.
“Mother is very concerned about the baby, preserving the life of the baby,” he added.
He also added that his former graduate student and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever also agrees with the “mother-baby” idea. Sutskever left OpenAI in 2024 and is currently developing his startup named Safe Superintelligence.
