More and more AI experts are raising alarm bells for white-collar workers.
After Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said that AI would make intelligence “too cheap to meter”, Geoffrey Hinton has said that like industrial intelligence had made human strength irrelevant, AI would make human intelligence irrelevant. Hinton is considered the godfather of AI, and had won the Nobel Prize this year in Physics. The former Google employee has been raising concerns about the impact of AI in recent years.
“In the Industrial Revolution, we made human strength irrelevant. Now we’re making human intelligence irrelevant,” he said in an interview. “And that’s very scary,” he added.
Hinton explained that the impact of human intelligence becoming irrelevant wouldn’t be felt uniformly across all fields. “So there’s some areas where demand is very elastic. An example would be healthcare. If I could get 10 hours a week talking to my doctor — I’m over 70 — I’d be very happy. So if you take someone and make them much more efficient by having them work with a very intelligent AI, they’re not going to become unemployed. It’s not that you’re now only going to need a few of them. You’re just going to get much more healthcare. Great! So in elastic areas, it’s great,” he explained.
But Hinton said that this wouldn’t translate into all sorts of jobs. “There’s some areas that are less elastic. I have a niece who answers letters of complaint to a health service. She used to take 25 minutes to answer a letter. Now she can just scan the letter into ChatGPT. It’ll give an answer. She’ll look at it, check it’s okay. That’s five minutes now. I suspect they’ll need less people like that. It may be that everybody can complain a lot more, but I suspect they’ll need less people like that,” he explained.
“So some jobs are elastic, and others aren’t. The non elastic ones, I think people will lose their jobs. And what’s going to happen is, the extra wealth created by the increase in productivity is not going to go to them,” Hinton said.
Hinton isn’t the only expert who’s expressed worry about white-collar jobs after the advent of AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has earlier said that AI would disrupt white-collar and creative jobs before it impacted blue-collar jobs. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has also declared that looking at the progress of AI over the last few quarters, very soon intelligence would be nearly free like air, and this could impact how knowledge work is done. And with the Godfather of AI now saying that AI could make human intelligence irrelevant, it might be time for white-collar workers to track AI developments very closely — there jobs might be greater peril than they expect.