Geoffrey Hinton contributed to the development of ChatGPT’s technology. He is now cautioning that it may ruin the same jobs it was designed to improve.
Hinton, who is often referred to as the “godfather of AI,” told that wealthy individuals will genuinely utilize AI to replace labor.
Profits will skyrocket and there will be a significant increase in unemployment. Most individuals will become poorer and a select few will become enormously wealthier.
Hinton, who received the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on neural networks and worked for Google for a decade before departing in 2023, believes the disruption is less about the technology itself than the environment it functions in.
“That’s not AI’s fault,” he continued, rather blaming the “capitalist system.”
The 77-year-old scholar also rejected solutions such as universal basic income, claiming that a monetary stipend would not compensate for the loss of dignity that comes with one’s employment.
According to him, universal basic income “won’t deal with human dignity,” as individuals derive their value from their jobs.
Not everybody is so pessimistic
Not many tech executives have the same pessimistic outlook on the future as Hinton.
As a safeguard against employment losses, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long advocated for universal basic income (UBI), even contributing to one of the biggest UBI trials in the United States.
Elon Musk has echoed such demands, stating to an audience at VivaTech last year that “probably none of us will have a job” in a benign AI future, but that universal income may allow people to seek purpose while machines take care of work.
Investor Vinod Khosla has gone a step further and predicted that 80% of employment will be completed by AI. This, he contends, would diminish the worth of human work and make universal basic income “crucial” to avert a spike in inequality.
UBI, on the other hand, is only “a small part” of the answer, according to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who also cautioned that society will need to create quite new systems to handle the change.
Hinton remains skeptical. While he earlier recommended the UK government explore UBI, he now believes cash handouts would not replace the feeling of dignity that people obtain from their jobs.
Despite having lost two spouses to cancer, he is hopeful that artificial intelligence will lead to improvements in healthcare and education.
Beyond that, though, he thinks the technology will probably affect lives more negatively than positively. He remarked, “We are at a time in history where something amazing is happening, and it could be amazingly good or amazingly bad.”
