{"id":308966,"date":"2025-12-08T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=308966"},"modified":"2025-12-02T07:02:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T07:02:20","slug":"godfather-of-ai-predicts-total-breakdown-of-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/12\/godfather-of-ai-predicts-total-breakdown-of-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Godfather of AI Predicts Total Breakdown of Society"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Geoffrey Hinton – Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Jorge Uzon \/ AFP via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Tech billionaires “are really betting on AI replacing a lot of workers.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

26 Nov 2025\u00a0<\/em>– Geoffrey Hinton, one of the three so-called \u201cgodfathers\u201d of AI, never misses an opportunity to issue foreboding proclamations about the tech he helped create.<\/p>\n

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During an hour-long public conversation<\/a> with Senator Bernie Sanders at Georgetown University last week, the British computer science laid out all the alarming ways that he forecasts AI will completely upend society for the worst, seemingly leaving little room for human contrivances like optimism. One of the reasons why is that AI\u2019s rapid deployment will be completely unlike technological revolutions in the past, which created new classes of jobs, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people who lose their jobs won\u2019t have other jobs to go to,\u201d Hinton said, as quoted by Business Insider<\/em><\/a>. \u201cIf AI gets as smart as people \u2014 or smarter \u2014 any job they might do can be done by AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese guys are really betting on AI replacing a lot of workers,\u201d Hinton added.<\/p>\n

Hinton pioneered the deep learning techniques that are foundational to the generative AI models fueling the AI boom today. His work on neural networks earned him a Turing Award in 2018, alongside University of Montreal researcher Yoshua Bengio and the former chief AI scientist at Meta Yann LeCun<\/a>. The trio are considered to be the \u201cgodfathers\u201d of AI.<\/p>\n

All three scientists have been outspoken about the tech\u2019s risks, to varying degrees. But it was Hinton who first began to turn the most heads when he said he regretted his life\u2019s work after stepping down from his role at Google<\/a> in 2023.<\/p>\n

He hasn\u2019t changed his tune since then. He has consistently warned that AI will destroy jobs and create massive unemployment<\/a>. This month, Hinton then injected more fatalism into this prediction by opining that the AI industry couldn\u2019t turn a profit without replacing human labor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In his discussion with Sanders, Hinton reiterated these risks, adding that the multibillionaires spearheading AI, like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison haven\u2019t really \u201cthought through\u201d the fact that \u201cif the workers don\u2019t get paid, there\u2019s nobody to buy their products,\u201d he said, per BI<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Previously, Hinton has said it wouldn\u2019t be \u201cinconceivable\u201d that humankind gets wiped out by AI<\/a>. He also believes\u00a0we\u2019re not that far away from achieving an artificial general intelligence, or AGI,\u00a0 a hypothetical AI system with human or superhuman levels of intelligence that is able to perform a vast array of tasks, which the AI industry is obsessed with building.<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI,\u201d Hinton said<\/a> in 2023. \u201cAnd now I think it may be 20 years or less.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strikingly, Hinton now claims that the latest models like OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5 \u201cknow thousands of times more than us already.\u201d<\/p>\n

While leading large language models are trained on a corpus of data vastly exceeding what a human could ever learn, many experts would disagree that this means that the AI actually \u201cknows\u201d what it\u2019s talking about. Moreover, many efforts to replace workers with semi-autonomous models called AI agents have often failed embarrassingly<\/a>, including in customer support roles<\/a> that many predicted were the most vulnerable to being outmoded. In other words, it\u2019s not quite set in stone that the tech will be to so easily replace even low-paying jobs.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, never put it past your overlords to find a way how to screw you over anyway. AI machines could be a great tool for carrying out imperial actions abroad; deploying AI robots to fight overseas would be great for the US military industrial complex, Hinton argued, since there wouldn\u2019t be dead soldiers to cause \u201cpolitical blowback.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it will remove one of the main barriers to rich powerful countries just invading little countries like Granada,\u201d Hinton told Sanders.<\/p>\n

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More on AI:<\/strong> Mark Zuckerberg Accused of Doing Unforgivable Things to Teens on Meta<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n