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Geoffrey Hinton, commonly known as the ‘godfather of artificial intelligence’, has made a bleak forecast of how jobs in the age of AI will look. In a recent Financial Times interview, he reported that although artificial intelligence will increase corporate profitability, it will displace human employees in large numbers. This shift, he said, would result in the majority of the people being poor and the wealth resorting to a small number.
Hinton, the Nobel Prize winner from last year who pioneered AI studies, has strongly complained on a number of occasions about the unregulated expansion of the technology. In his opinion, AI may destabilise the labour markets and exacerbate economic inequality without tight control. In his view, AI is not the threat, but the capitalist system that puts money ahead of humanity is.
Hinton cautioned that firms will start to employ AI more often to substitute the human workforce, which will push profitability up and trigger mass unemployment. It will render a handful of people a great deal wealthier and the majority poorer, he said, and it is the economic system that is to blame for this asymmetry.
Pointing to the uncertainty of the technology, Hinton stated that no one really knows where the development of AI will go. He proposed that the eventualities would either be amazingly good or amazingly bad, but what is definite is that the society will not be the same.
The pioneer of AI also raised a concern that the advanced systems would develop their unique way of communication and that human beings would not be able to control them or even comprehend them. He cautioned that AI can already produce dangerous thoughts and can one day even outrun human understanding.
Hinton opposed big tech companies on the basis of downplaying the dangers of AI as they continued with fast development. He observed that some of the leaders, including Demis Hassabis, recognise the risks, but he maintained that as a whole, the industry is evolving at a rate that is accelerating beyond anticipation.
