AI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton 'very worried' about AI taking away your job: What he said

Geoffrey Hinton said that AI will boost productivity and generate more wealth but it might lead to income inequality.

Geoffrey Hinton, often known as Artificial Intelligence (AI) godfather said that he's "very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs." He also floated the idea of universal basic income being a solution at the time of changes in the job market due to AI. He said, "I was consulted by people in Downing Street. I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea.”

Geoffrey Hinton floated the idea of universal basic income being a solution at the time of changes in the job market due to AI. (Reuters)

He asserted that AI will boost productivity and generate more wealth but it might lead to income inequality owing to which the technology will result in the rich getting richer while people might lose their jobs. He said, “That's going to be very bad for society.”

Advocating for a more cautious approach to AI development, he said that in just 5 to 20 years AI could be an "extinction-level threat" for humans.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also running his own experiment around a universal basic income as per which instead of receiving cash, everyone could receive a slice of a future large language model such as GPT-7, he said.

"They can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research," he said.

On the impact of AI, the OpenAI CEO earlier said, “The thing I'm most worried about right now is, the sort of, the speed and magnitude of the socioeconomic change may have, and what the impacts on what that will be.”

He added, “GPT- 4 didn't have this huge detectable impact on the economy, and so people were kind of like, ”Oh well, we were too worried about that, and that's not a problem. I have a fear that we just won't take that one seriously enough going forward, and it's a massive, massive issue."