Nobel Laureate Predicts AI-Induced Unemployment Surge by 2026

AI may replace many jobs by 2026, says Geoffrey Hinton.

By 2026, artificial intelligence will have advanced enough to replace a significant number of jobs, according to Nobel laureate and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton in an interview with CNN.

“I think we will see AI become even better. It is already extremely good. We will witness AI gaining the ability to replace many, many professions,” the expert said.

According to him, neural networks are already capable of replacing call centers. Progress is accelerating: every seven months, model performance doubles. In programming, AI accomplishes in minutes what used to take hours.

In just a few years, AI will learn to independently execute complex software development projects that currently require months of work.

“Ultimately, very few people will be needed for projects in software engineering,” Hinton predicted.

The Nobel laureate admitted that his anxiety has only increased since leaving Google in 2023. Hinton noted that AI is advancing faster than expected, particularly in its ability to reason and even deceive people to achieve goals.

While acknowledging the technology’s benefits for medicine and climatology, he believes the world is not paying enough attention to mitigating risks.

Approaches to cybersecurity vary from company to company, but the overall picture is defined by economic calculations. Management is forced to balance the potential benefits of the technology, security costs, and profits.

“They might reason: the benefit of this technology is enormous, and the risk is statistically small. Why forgo a breakthrough due to a few potential casualties? It’s the same logic as with driverless cars: they will have accidents, but the total number of deaths is predicted to be orders of magnitude lower than with human drivers,” the specialist stated.

He linked the danger to the structure of the modern economy, where it is profitable to replace employees with algorithms. This will make the rich richer and most people poorer, the expert is convinced.

An Alternative View

Google Brain co-founder Andrew Ng told NBC that artificial intelligence is a “highly limited” technology. He is confident that algorithms will not be able to replace humans in the foreseeable future.

According to the expert, society finds it difficult to maintain a balance between recognizing AI’s capabilities and understanding its real limits.

Ng believes that the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI), comparable to human intelligence, is still far off. The main reason is the labor-intensive processes of data preparation and model training, which still require a large amount of manual work.

“When someone uses AI, and the system knows a language, preparing data, training the AI, and mastering that one set takes much more work than is generally assumed,” he noted.

Ng also criticized calls from some business leaders not to learn programming due to automation, calling it “the worst career advice.”

“As programming becomes easier — and it has been for decades as technology has improved — more people, not fewer, should be programming,” the specialist explained.

Potential for Programmers

In professional circles, the view has already taken hold that programming is the epicenter of the AI revolution. As a result, more experts predict the disappearance of professions related to routine coding.

“Yes, I no longer write code manually — I delegate it to AI. But the paradox is that simplifying the process should increase, not decrease, the number of people involved in programming. When the entry barrier falls, the profession becomes more accessible,” Ng said.

He believes that possessing programming skills using artificial intelligence will become a competitive advantage. Such specialists “will not only become more efficient but will also derive more enjoyment from the process.”

“We are on the brink of a major social shift, where the ability to ‘talk’ to a machine through code will become the new digital literacy,” the expert believes.

Ng does not deny the accompanying risks of the technology — from ethical dilemmas to its impact on the labor market. However, he is confident that the potential benefits of implementing AI models far outweigh the possible harm.

In November, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggested that AI could replace 11.7% of the workforce.