This is all fine from the perspective of the corporations, although this spike in profits is unlikely to be long lasting. But how about the employees who lose their jobs? The scale of the impact of AI on employment is of such proportions that one wonders about all these people who will not longer be employable.
* People will consume less because they have no incomes, with a negative impact on the economy.
* There will be less tax revenue flowing into government coffers because unemployed people will pay no income tax. With diminishing tax revenues, governments will no longer afford to provide services.
* Unemployed people will pay no social security tax, and less money will go into the Social Security fund which will deplete faster than anticipated. Trouble for future retirees.
* Unemployed people will save less, if at all. Less money will go into retirement savings and 401Ks.
One could go on and on about potentially disastrous ripple effects that AI will cause.
Solutions?
There aren't any because when you push the human element out of the economic picture, an economy driven by automated artificial intelligence will operate in parallel with,and with no need for, the human element.
Some countries are contemplating "Universal Salaries". i.e. the government will pay you a bare "survival" minimum without your work in exchange. But where will the money come from if most people are not working and not paying taxes? Printing money is obviously not the answer.
You can already see in nearly every country millions of people demonstrating against cuts, rising prices, corruption and against the insulting profits that corporations are raking. Capitalism as we know it may not survive AI: The means of production will not include humans as their essential component. AI will dispense capitalism of its workers. Production by machines and robots can continue, but if people have no incomes to buy the products, then what is the point?
I already see signs of a re-evaluation and consideration of policies that reek of socialism and communism. Perhaps that is not such a bad idea, as long as the associated economic policies do not include brutality, party dictatorships and repression.
The prosperity of the past 200-300 years, which lifted millions out of poverty and into the middle class, is no longer.
The human population continues to grow in numbers, but in a slanted fashion: Rich wealthy nations are not making enough children to replace an aging population that lives longer and longer because of scientific advances. Imagine the disaster of the aforementioned consequences on such a configuration.
Meanwhile, the populations of poor developing nations are growing faster and faster, but their economic prospects are dire because they have so far relied on wealthy nations for assistance and technology transfers. They will likely fail before even reaching the prosperity levels modeled on the performance of wealthy nations.
The massive migratory flows from poor developing nations to the wealthy nations may give humanity a break: Migrants furnish the workforce that is increasingly shrinking in wealthy nations. But migrants will increasingly find fewer and fewer jobs because of AI, and are rarely equiped and trained to run the machines and the robots.
The Malthusian curse is upon us: Our numbers are overwhelming our environment, and our inventiveness (AI) is worsening our capacity at surviving. Malthus predicted wars and diseases as major consequences of a population whose requirements outpace the capacity of the environment to sustain it. The more we grow, the more we invade our environment and deplete it.
The answers are radical:
Degrowth. Cease living with the capitalist notion that we must have growth. Growth implies exploiting more resources and accepting an infinite population growth.
Reduction in populations. Instead of waiting for calamities and diseases to limit population growth, humans can proactively enact policies that favor a reduction in birth rates.
End point: A human society with fewer but older people being served by machines. Sounds like outlandish science fiction, but it's around the corner. Lucky for some of us who won't be there to witness it.
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‘Godfather of AI’ says the technology will create massive unemployment and send profits soaring — ‘that is the capitalist system’
Jason Ma
Sat, September 6, 2025
Geoffrey Hinton delivers his Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm on Dec. 8, 2024. (Pontus Lundahl—TT NEWS AGENCY/AFP via Getty Images)
Computer scientist and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton predicted artificial intelligence will spark a surge in unemployment and profits as companies replace workers with AI. But it’s not the technology’s fault, he told the Financial Times, attributing it instead to capitalism. While layoffs haven’t spiked, evidence is mounting that AI is shrinking opportunities at the entry level.
Pioneering computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, whose work has earned him a Nobel Prize and the moniker “godfather of AI,” said artificial intelligence will spark a surge in unemployment and profits.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, the former Google scientist cleared the air about why he left the tech giant, raised alarms on potential threats from AI, and revealed how he uses the technology. But he also predicted who the winners and losers will be.
“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said. “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.”
That echos comments he gave to Fortune last month, when he said AI companies are more concerned with short-term profits than the long-term consequences of the technology.
For now, layoffs haven’t spiked, but evidence is mounting that AI is shrinking opportunities, especially at the entry level where recent college graduates start their careers.
A survey from the New York Fed found that companies using AI are much more likely to retrain their employees than fire them, though layoffs are expected to rise in the coming months.
Hinton said earlier that healthcare is the one industry that will be safe from the potential jobs armageddon.
“If you could make doctors five times as efficient, we could all have five times as much health care for the same price,” he explained on the Diary of a CEO YouTube series in June. “There’s almost no limit to how much health care people can absorb—[patients] always want more health care if there’s no cost to it.”
Still, Hinton believes that jobs that perform mundane tasks will be taken over by AI, while sparing some jobs that require a high level of skill.
In his interview with the FT, he also dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s idea to pay a universal basic income as AI disrupts the economy and reduce demand for workers, saying it “won’t deal with human dignity” and the value people derive from having jobs.
Hinton has long warned about the dangers of AI without guardrails, estimating a 10% to 20% chance of the technology wiping out humans after the development of superintelligence.
In his view, the dangers of AI fall into two categories: the risk the technology itself poses to the future of humanity, and the consequences of AI being manipulated by people with bad intent.
In his FT interview, he warned AI could help someone build a bioweapon and lamented the Trump administration’s unwillingness to regulate AI more closely, while China is taking the threat more seriously. But he also acknowledged potential upside from AI amid its immense possibilities and uncertainties.
“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,” Hinton said. “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.”
Meanwhile, he told the FT how he uses AI in his own life, saying OpenAI’s ChatGPT is his product of choice. While he mostly uses the chatbot for research, Hinton revealed that a former girlfriend used ChatGPT “to tell me what a rat I was” during their breakup.
“She got the chatbot to explain how awful my behavior was and gave it to me. I didn’t think I had been a rat, so it didn’t make me feel too bad . . . I met somebody I liked more, you know how it goes,” he quipped.
Hinton also explained why he left Google in 2023. While media reports have said he quit so he could speak more freely about the dangers of AI, the 77-year-old Nobel laureate denied that was the reason.
“I left because I was 75, I could no longer program as well as I used to, and there’s a lot of stuff on Netflix I haven’t had a chance to watch,” he said. “I had worked very hard for 55 years, and I felt it was time to retire . . . And I thought, since I am leaving anyway, I could talk about the risks.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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