Over the past few years, AI has garnered a massive amount of traction in the tech space, with most corporations trying to tap into the hype despite the technology's high capital and computing demands. The next-gen tech has come a long way from the early Bing Chat and ChatGPT hallucination days to sophisticated large language models (LLMs) that can generate images almost indistinguishable from real life.
While AI models show great promise across a wide range of sectors, including education, medicine, and computing, they also ship with their fair share of challenges. Multiple users have cited privacy and security concerns, which have seemingly prompted them to keep the technology at arm's length so far.
Perhaps more concerning, the technology poses a great threat to employment and humanity itself. In an episode of The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, former Google scientist and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton (also known as The Godfather of AI) echoed similar sentiments, suggesting the broad advances in the AI landscape will lead to mass unemployment as companies replace employees using the next-gen tech to generate profits (via Fortune).
This news comes barely a week after AI safety researcher and director of the Cyber Security Laboratory at the University of Louisville, Roman Yampolskiy, predicted that AI will lead to levels of unemployment we've never seen before, leaving 99% of humanity without jobs by 2030.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates echoed similar sentiments earlier this year when he claimed that AI will replace humans for most things. However, he indicated that we'll have control over which tasks to strictly preserve for humans. The philanthropic billionaire joked that no one would like to watch computers playing baseball.
What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. 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.
Google scientist and Nobel laureate, Geoffrey Hinton
Gates claimed that three professionals would survive the AI revolution, including biologists, energy experts, and coders. He claimed that these professions are too complex to fully augment using AI, highlighting the importance of human intervention and creativity. Perhaps more concerning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed AI will steal 50% of entry-level white collar jobs, leaving Gen Z out of work.
Similarly, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang discouraged the youth from pursuing a career in software development, suggesting that coding might already be dead in the water with the vast prevalence of AI.
More trouble and danger abound with AI
Aside from AI's negative impact on the job market, Geoffrey Hinton expressed his concerns about the technology's threat to humanity and its potential and susceptibility to manipulation by bad actors to develop bioweapons. He further highlighted the Trump administration's unwillingness to put elaborate measures and regulations in place to prevent the technology from spiralling out of control as a huge "red flag".
According to Hinton:
“We don’t know what is going to happen, we have no idea, and people who tell you what is going to happen are just being silly. We are at a point in history where something amazing is happening, and it may be amazingly good, and it may be amazingly bad. We can make guesses, but things aren’t going to stay like they are.”
Roman Yampolskiy admitted that AI has advanced beyond our control, making it difficult to mitigate future threats and challenges it might create. However, he indicated that humans still have the upper hand and we could use our voice to spread awareness and hold stakeholders in the ever-evolving industry accountable for their actions.
As top AI labs race to achieve the coveted AGI (artificial general intelligence) benchmark, OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, indicated that he is more focused on self-replication, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella doubles down on delivering real-world impact using AI.
Altman indicated that the dangers and concerns raised by critics and concerned users won't be experienced during the AGI moment. Instead, the benchmark could be achieved in the next five years, and it could whoosh by with surprisingly little societal impact.
However, Google's DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis claims that AGI could be achieved soon, but society isn't prepared to handle all it entails. He further indicated that the prospects keep him up at night. He isn't the only one.
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