The rapid progress of AI is astounding. It takes a crystal ball to determine exactly what the future holds, but the people best placed to comment on the potential impact of AI are those with deep roots in the world of AI. There are few better candidates in this field than Jeffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI” himself. In 2024, Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his “fundamental discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” He is a British-born scientist working at the University of Toronto in Canada, who basically laid the foundation for machine learning models. But even he is shocked at how far things have progressed in this area.
“It's going to have the ability to replace so many jobs,” the scientist said in a December 2025 interview with CNN when asked what he thought the technology would be capable of in 2026. He highlighted the fact that call center workers are already being replaced by AI, but AI is advancing in every field and becoming incredibly prominent. “Every seven months, you'll be able to perform tasks for about twice as long,” he continued. Hinton uses a coding example to suggest that “a minute's worth of coding” has grown into “an hour's worth of projects.” This advancement suggests that “in a few years it will be possible to run software engineering projects that take months, and by that time there will be very little talent needed for software engineering projects.” There are still some big problems with AI coding that seem to be getting worse, but whether they can be fixed is a big concern.
What other leaders are saying about the impact of AI on jobs
In Jeffrey Hinton's view, some designers of chatbots and other AI systems are not showing enough humility in the face of this extraordinary technology. In the same CNN interview, he said, “Initially, OpenAI was very concerned about risk, but…we gradually moved away from that risk and started focusing on profit over safety.”
While he does have some authority on predicting what AI will look like in 2026, he is not the only authority on the subject. And not everyone in the industry exactly agrees. Others have a similarly grim outlook for the future, with Adam Doll, head of research at RethinkX, telling the Guardian in July 2025 that while “there will remain gaps in the human workforce in some sectors”, “the problem is that there aren't enough jobs to employ 4 billion people”. But in an interview with the newspaper, Do continued that this freed-up time could help humans live “meaningful, purposeful lives” and “find meaning in our relationships with friends and family and connections with our communities.”
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO and one of the best-known figures in the global AI world, said he believes the job market will change significantly. In a May 2025 interview with Bloomberg, he said he expects AI to change some jobs and take away others, but it will also “create a lot of new jobs.” For example, with AI being able to help design CPUs, we don't know how far this technology will ultimately go.
AI may be further integrated in certain areas
Jeffrey Hinton highlighted coding as an area where AI is rapidly advancing. This means that AI has the potential to replace experts in the field. Of course, that's not the only field. In August 2025, Microsoft published a report examining the impact of AI and predicting which areas will be most affected. According to research, these were interpreters and translators, historians, and passenger crew.
However, Microsoft noted that this does not necessarily mean these areas are at the highest risk of being taken over by AI. A post by the researchers on the Microsoft Research Blog reminded readers that they “clearly cautioned in the paper not to use the findings to reach their conclusions.” The researchers investigated how people use AI tools, specifically by looking at which activities are most frequently assigned to more than 200,000 “anonymized and privacy-protected conversations” in Microsoft Bing Copilot. They combined this data with an AI applicability score they assigned to each occupation based on the types of tasks each required.
According to Microsoft, the idea was to determine areas where AI chatbots could be more important or supported. Some may point to an alarming pattern of losses that have already occurred, but as Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Yale Budget Lab, said on the BBC in October 2025, “The inclusion of the phrase AI in this conversation makes people feel very different… So far, what I've seen looks different than the typical pattern of corporate hiring and firing, especially at this point in the economic cycle.”
