Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” has sounded another stark warning about the future of work.
He believes AI will make corporations more profitable than ever, but at the devastating cost of widespread unemployment.
“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, whose pioneering work in machine learning laid the foundation for today’s AI revolution, cautioned that the world is entering uncharted territory.
“We don’t know what is going to happen. It may be amazingly good, or it may be amazingly bad. Things aren’t going to stay like they are,” he said.
The Nobel Prize winner has long warned of AI’s potential to destabilize economies, particularly if chatbots and other systems develop language and reasoning capabilities beyond human oversight.
“AI has already shown it can think terrible thoughts,” he said, suggesting machines may eventually reason in ways humans cannot interpret.
His concerns echo those of Roman Yampolskiy, a computer science professor at the University of Louisville, who this week predicted AI could wipe out 99% of jobs by 2030.
Yampolskiy argued that even highly skilled professions such as software engineers and prompt designers will not be spared once artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrives, possibly as early as 2027.
“We’re not talking about 10% unemployment, which is scary enough, but 99%,” Yampolskiy said. “Employment gives people income, structure, status, and community. If jobs vanish, societies will need to manufacture all four at scale and we have no plan B.”
With warnings mounting from two of AI’s most prominent voices, the debate over how to balance innovation, profit, and human livelihoods has never been more urgent.