- Geoffrey Hinton warns AI will cause massive unemployment and increase economic inequality
- He states capitalist system, not AI, drives wealth concentration from worker replacement
- AI impacts entry-level jobs most; healthcare may be the only relatively safe sector
Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the "Godfather of AI" and a Nobel laureate, has repeatedly warned that the technology is likely to cause massive unemployment and widen economic inequality. Hinton argued that "rich people are going to use AI to replace workers" in order to maximize profits, making a few people much wealthier while leaving most people poorer. He explicitly states that this is an issue with the "capitalist system" rather than the technology itself.
"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," Hinton said in an interview in September.
He echoed similar concerns to Fortune in August 2025, pointing out AI companies prioritise short-term gains over long-term impact. While layoffs aren't skyrocketing, signs suggest AI's impact on job opportunities is real, especially for fresh grads entering the workforce. The New York Fed survey found AI-using companies prefer retraining over firing, but job cuts might be on the horizon.
The only sector that will be safe, according to Hinton, is healthcare.
"If you could make doctors five times as efficient, we could all have five times as much health care for the same price. 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," he explained on the Diary of a CEO YouTube series in June 2025.
While some tech leaders, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, suggest new jobs will emerge to offset losses, Hinton believes that while new jobs may be created, they will not compensate for the massive scale of the jobs eliminated.
Jobs involving routine, repetitive, or "mundane intellectual labor" are most at risk, including entry-level positions in tech and customer service roles. Blue-collar jobs requiring physical manipulation, such as plumbing, may be safer in the short term.
Hinton dismissed the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) as a complete solution, an idea proposed by figures like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk. He argues that a paycheck alone does not address the fundamental human need for dignity and purpose that work provides.
Elon Musk and Bill Gates also believe humans may not be needed for most jobs in the future, with Musk suggesting that in a benign scenario, universal income might let people pursue other meanings in life. Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argues that AI will transform jobs rather than eliminate them, creating new roles for those who adapt their skills.
