Recent Nobel Prize winner and one of the godfathers of AI Geoffrey Hinton has been repeatedly warning anyone who’ll listen about the existential dangers of AI, but he also believes that AI will impact humanity in more tangible ways.
Geoffrey Hinton says that he believes that AI will lead to “massive unemployment”. “I’m fairly confident (AI) will cause massive unemployment, and we’re seeing that already,” he said in a recent documentary. “We’re seeing it already. We live in a capitalist society, and if some big employer, like Microsoft, can save on wages by replacing junior programmers with AI, that’s what it’s gonna do. In fact, that’s what it’s done,” he added.
Hinton seemed to be referring to the recent Microsoft layoffs, in which as many as 7,000 employees were laid off to improve business efficiencies. Fellow tech giant Amazon had been even more upfront about the impact of AI, saying that its workforce would likely shrink over the next few years because of the impact of AI.
But Hinton says there are even bigger things than job losses to worry about. “Most people are unable to comprehend the idea of things more intelligent than us. They always think, well, how are we gonna use this thing? They don’t think, well, how’s it gonna use us?” Hinton said.
“The risk that we’ll develop an AI that’s much smarter than us and it will just take over (isn’t just science fiction),” Hinton said. “It won’t need us anymore. The good news is it won’t eat us ’cause it’ll be made of silicon. So eating us wouldn’t do it much good,” he added. Hinton also said that he didn’t believe that it was possible to stop AI development. “There’s no chance that (AI) development will be stopped. It might be rational to stop it, but that’s not gonna happen. So our only hope is that we can develop it and keep it safe, and that’s what people should be working on,” he added.
Now Geoffrey Hinton has created some of the most fundamental technologies which underpin modern AI, including backpropagation and the 2012 AlexNet paper, which proved how Deep Learning could be scaled to solve image recognition problems. Hinton was also the doctoral advisor of OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024 in Physics for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
Hinton has long been warning about the path AI is on, and believes that it poses an existential risk to humanity. He’s previously said that his greatest fear around creating AI is that humans will no longer be needed, and that AI could one day compete with humans for resources. He also believes that AI has the potential to be deliberately deceptive, and that it’s scary because it can learn from each other much faster than humans. He’s also likened making AI models open-source to selling radioactive materials at Radioshack. Thus far, most of Hinton’s arguments seemed to center around how AI could pose an existential threat to humans, but he now seems to think that given the trajectory at which it is developing, it could cause “massive unemployment” in the short run.