According to a tech pioneer who helped AI become popular, a universal basic income should be provided to all people to offset the disruptive effects of this contentious technology on employment.
Former Google vice president Geoffrey Hinton said AI and robots would be ‘very bad for society’ because the millions of workers left jobless by the technology will not enjoy the wealth resulting from the boom in productivity.
Speaking to the BBC’s Newsnight, the academic said: ‘I certainly believe in a universal basic income.
‘But I don’t think that’s enough because a lot of people get their self-respect from the jobs they do.’
He continued: ‘If you pay everybody a universal basic income, that solves the problem of them starving and not being able to pay the rent but that doesn’t solve the self-respect problem.’
The expert, who said he had raised the idea of universal basic income at Downing Street, warned that many blue-collar and ‘mid-level intellectual jobs’ will disappear because of AI, but predicted that plumbing could be safe from the march of the robots.
‘My best bet about a job that is safe is plumbing because these things [AI] aren’t yet very good at physical manipulation,’ he said. ‘That will probably be the last thing they are very good at.’
His caution follows the IMF’s forecast that artificial intelligence will impact 40% of jobs globally. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, the deployment of AI in the workplace might result in the loss of eight million jobs in the United Kingdom.
Hinton, who quit Google in 2023 to sound the alarm about AI, said he was pleased that the world was now taking its ‘existential threat’ to humanity seriously, as well as its impact on society.
‘I am very worried about AI taking over lots of mundane jobs,’ he said. ‘That should be a good thing. It’s going to lead to a big increase in productivity, which leads to a big increase in wealth, and if that wealth was equally distributed, that would be great, but it’s not going to be.
‘In the systems we live in, that wealth is going to go to the rich and not to the people whose jobs get lost, and that’s going to be very bad for society, I believe.
‘It’s going to increase the gap between rich and poor, which increases the chances of Right-wing populists getting elected,’ he warned.
Just a few days ago, Sainsbury’s and Microsoft agreed to deploy AI capabilities from the tech giant to enhance the shopping experience for consumers and free up staff members’ time so they can concentrate on important duties.
Permanent job loss and high immigration rates are two incompatible things, particularly if the individuals who are already here cannot be sent back.
We thus know that AI will eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide, and therefore we need to decide as a society to prioritise human life over AI, but corporate greed won’t allow that to happen, and civilisation will not survive when you have hundreds of millions of people with no purpose. Advanced technology (AI) will not benefit society, it will destroy it!
AI is already devastating the creative industry, and the news industry will be quickly devastated as well because no one will know what is true and what is AI-generated. Menial jobs may hang around for a little while but AI will eventually create robots that will be just as good as any craftsman. I bet you don’t think ‘Terminator’ was just fiction now!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 