Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist often hailed as the "Godfather of AI," has issued a stark warning about the future of artificial intelligence and its potential to reshape the global workforce and society. In a recent interview with the Financial Times on September 9, 2025, Hinton didn't mince words: "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, who helped invent the neural networks powering technologies like ChatGPT, left Google Brain in 2023 and has since become one of the most prominent voices warning about AI’s disruptive potential. According to Business Insider, he played a pivotal role in the development of the technology behind today’s leading AI models, but now he’s sounding the alarm about the very systems he helped create.
The heart of Hinton’s warning is the way AI will fundamentally change the labor market. He argues that the technology’s advancement is poised to fuel massive unemployment, as wealthy individuals and corporations turn to AI to replace human workers. The result? Soaring profits for a select few, while the majority see their fortunes decline—a widening of the rich-poor divide that Hinton attributes more to economic systems than to the technology itself. "It’s not AI’s fault, it’s the capitalist system," he emphasized, as reported by India Today and LADbible.
Hinton’s concerns go beyond just job losses. He believes that AI is a transformative force, one that societies are simply not prepared for. The systems being built today, he says, are not merely powerful tools—they’re potential agents of economic upheaval and social change. In his view, AI could become the "worst nightmare for labour that Karl Marx didn’t predict," fundamentally altering the balance of power between those who have wealth and those who do not.
And the timeline for this upheaval? Hinton told the Financial Times that a consensus among scientists suggests superintelligent AI—machines capable of out-thinking even the cleverest humans—could arrive within five to twenty years. "A lot of scientists agree between five and 20 years," he said. "That’s the best bet." For Hinton, the arrival of such advanced AI isn’t a matter of "if," but "when."
But what about the human side of this technological revolution? Hinton is critical of those who urge people, especially younger generations, to "stay positive" in the face of such sweeping changes. He likened the situation to an impending alien invasion, saying, "Suppose there was an alien invasion you could see with a telescope that would arrive in 10 years, would you be saying 'How do we stay positive?' No, you’d be saying, 'How on earth are we going to deal with this?' If staying positive means pretending it's not going to happen, then people shouldn't stay positive."
Hinton’s warnings have been echoed by others in the tech world. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently told CNN that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, potentially raising U.S. unemployment to 20 percent by 2030. "AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it," Amodei said. He noted that AI systems can now summarize documents, analyze sources, and write code at the level of a smart college student, making many traditional jobs vulnerable.
The threat isn’t just theoretical. According to the Australian Social Policy Group, if current trends continue, up to one third of Australia’s workforce could face unemployment by 2030 due to AI adoption. Giuseppe Carabetta, Associate Professor of employment law at the University of Technology Sydney, described the shift as the "new outsourcing," with AI replacing jobs across all levels of the service industry. "At this level, we’ve had AI for some time without necessarily realising it," Carabetta told news.com.au. "But at worse, it can simply be about cost-cutting or trying to compete not on the basis of technologically driven productivity but savings on the wages bill."
Some in the tech industry, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have proposed universal basic income (UBI) as a possible solution to AI-induced unemployment. Hinton, however, is skeptical. He argues that UBI "won’t deal with human dignity" or the profound sense of purpose that work provides. He worries that the loss of work will strip people of meaning, not just income.
The rise of superintelligent AI also raises existential questions about control. Hinton points out that once machines surpass human intelligence, maintaining authority over them could be nearly impossible. He draws an analogy from nature: "There is only one example we know of a much more intelligent being controlled by a much less intelligent being, and that is a mother and baby. If babies couldn’t control their mothers, they would die." Hinton suggests that developers should train AI with "motherly instincts," so that machines treat humans as their children and are motivated to preserve human well-being. "The only hope according to Hinton is to train AI to become mothers because the mother is very concerned about the baby, preserving the life of the baby," reported India Today.
Hinton’s analogy is more than just a metaphor—it’s a call for a fundamental rethinking of how AI is designed. He believes that instilling a kind of "maternal care" into AI is the only hope for ensuring humanity’s safety in a world where machines might one day vastly outperform us in intelligence.
Despite the gravity of his warnings, Hinton’s tone is not one of despair but of urgency. At 77, he acknowledges his own time is limited: "I am 77, and the end is coming for me soon anyway." Yet his focus remains firmly on the future and the generations who will inherit the world shaped by AI.
Hinton’s message is clear: the world stands on the brink of a technological revolution that could redefine work, wealth, and even the relationship between humans and machines. Whether societies heed his warnings—and prepare for the profound changes ahead—remains to be seen.
