Geoffrey Hinton helped invent the technology behind ChatGpt. Now he warns that it could destroy the very work it was intended to strengthen.
“What really happens is that the rich use AI to replace workers,” Hinton is often referred to as the “AI godfather,” he told the Financial Times last Friday.
“It will generate massive unemployment and a significant rise in profits. It will enrich the few and make most people poorer.”
Hinton, who won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in neural networks and spent 10 years at Google before departing in 2023, said it has less confusion than the systems that run within it.
“It's not the AI's fault,” he said, denounced the “capitalist system.”
The 77-year-old researcher also dismissed ideas like universal basic income as a solution, claiming that cash scholarships do not deal with the loss of dignity that comes from people's work.
Universal basic income “doesn't deal with human dignity,” he said, adding that people gain value from their work.
Not everyone is that pessimistic
Not all tech leaders share a bleak view of Hinton's future.
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Openai CEO Sam Altman has long pitched the universal basic income as a cushion against unemployment, funding one of the largest UBI exams in the United States.
Elon Musk reflects these calls and tells the audience at Vivatech last year that in the future of benign AI, “probably none of us have a job,” but universal income allows humans to pursue meaning while machines handle the work.
Investor Vinod Khosla is going further, predicting that AI will run 80% of jobs and 80% of jobs. He argues that it will reduce the value of human labor and make UBI “significant” to prevent a surge in inequality.
Meanwhile, humanity's CEO, Dario Amodei, calls UBI a “small part” of the solution, warning that society needs to invent an entirely new system to manage its shift.
Hinton isn't sure. He had previously advised the UK government to explore UBI, but he now says that cash payments are not going to replace the sense of dignity that people come from their work.
Having lost two wives to cancer, he still hopes that AI will provide a breakthrough in health care and education.
But beyond that, he believes that the technology is more likely to erode livelihoods than lifting them up.
“We may be surprisingly good or surprisingly bad in history where amazing things are going on,” he said.
