Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded as the godfather of AI (artificial intelligence), has raised fresh alarms over the impact of advanced AI on global jobs. While the technology is making companies richer than ever, Hinton warned it will likely come at the cost of workers’ livelihoods.
Profits vs. Jobs
In an interview with the Financial Times, Hinton said the rapid rise of AI will boost corporate profits but also fuel massive unemployment.
“Rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” he said.
“It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”
Hinton, who won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for his pioneering work in machine learning, has long cautioned against the dangers of unchecked AI growth.
A Turning Point in History
The AI pioneer said society is standing at a crossroads.
“We don’t know what is going to happen… it may be amazingly good, or it may be amazingly bad,” he explained, adding that anyone who claims to know the future of AI is “just being silly.”
Hinton has previously warned that AI chatbots could eventually develop their own language, making it impossible for humans to fully track or interpret their thinking.
99% Jobless by 2030?
Echoing Hinton’s fears, Roman Yampolskiy, a computer science professor at the University of Louisville, recently claimed that AI could eliminate 99% of jobs by 2030.
Yampolskiy predicted that even skilled roles like coders and prompt engineers won’t be safe from automation once artificial general intelligence (AGI) — human-like machine intelligence — arrives, which he expects by 2027.
“We’re looking at a world with unemployment we’ve never seen before. Not 10%, but 99%,” he warned.
“All jobs will be automated. Then there is no plan B. You cannot retrain.”
According to him, employment doesn’t just provide income but also status, structure, and community — and societies would need to rebuild all of these if jobs vanish on a massive scale.
