The long-term impact of artificial intelligence is one of the most hotly debated topics in Silicon Valley. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts that every job will change and may lead to a four-day work week. Other tech giants have gone even further, with Bill Gates saying that humans may soon not be needed to do "most things" and Elon Musk arguing that in "less than 20 years" most humans won't need to work at all.
Geoffrey Hinton, a British computer scientist known as the "Godfather of Artificial Intelligence," said that while these predictions may sound extreme, they are not only credible, but possible.
However, he warned that such a shift could trigger a sweeping economic restructuring that would leave millions of workers behind.
“In many people’s minds, artificial intelligence is likely to lead to mass unemployment,” Hinton said in a recent discussion with U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders at Georgetown University.
"If you ask these guys where the roughly trillion dollars invested in data centers and chips are going to come from, one of the major sources of funding is going to be selling people AI that will do the workers' jobs at a lower cost. So these guys are really betting that AI will replace a lot of workers."
Hinton has become increasingly outspoken about what he believes are misaligned priorities at big tech companies. He said in a recent interview that the industry is driven less by scientific progress than by short-term profits, fueling a trend toward replacing human workers with cheaper AI systems.
Hinton acknowledged that AI will create new jobs, as many tech leaders predict. But he added that he doesn't expect the number of new positions to come close to the number of positions that have been eliminated. Even so, he warned that all predictions - including his own - should be viewed with serious skepticism.
"Trying to predict its future is going to be very difficult," he told Sanders. "It's a bit like you're driving in the fog. At 100 yards you can see clearly, at 200 yards you can't see anything. Well, we can see clearly for a year or two, but 10 years from now, we don't know what's going to happen."
One thing that is clear, however, is that AI is not going away, and experts say workers who adapt and use the technology to enhance their skills will be the most likely to excel in the coming upheaval.
Sanders sought to quantify the stakes. In a report released in October (based in part on estimates from ChatGPT), he warned that nearly 100 million U.S. jobs could be displaced by automation. Fast-food, customer service and manual workers are most at risk, while white-collar jobs such as accounting, software development and nursing could also see significant declines.
"This is not just an economic issue," Sanders wrote in an op-ed. "Work, whether as a janitor or a brain surgeon, is an integral part of being human. The vast majority of people want to be productive members of society and contribute to their communities. What happens when important aspects of human existence disappear from our lives?"
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., sounded a similar note, warning that the disruption could hit young people first and hardest, potentially pushing unemployment among recent college graduates to 25% in the next two to three years.
"Let's look at the fact that we've never done anything on social media," Warner said in an interview. "If we reacted the same way to artificial intelligence and didn't put guardrails in place, I think we would regret it."