Former Google CEO Predicts Job Losses Due to AI Within Six Years

Eric Schmidt predicts job losses due to AI within six years.

Most people will lose their jobs within three to six years following the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“A new, non-human intelligence is emerging, likely with better reasoning capabilities than the average human. It is commonly referred to as AGI — superintelligence. This will happen very quickly, and people are not ready for it,” he noted.

All experts from San Francisco working with Schmidt are confident that such AI will appear in the next two to four years. The breakthrough will be catalyzed by the reasoning systems of AI models.

“Take, for instance, GPT-4o-mini, observe how it constructs chains of reasoning — it’s mind-blowing, especially when you ask a question you know nothing about and watch how it thinks,” the expert pointed out.

The consensus among scientists in San Francisco is that the moment of “recursive self-improvement” is imminent — the system will start learning from itself and accelerate to speeds incomprehensible to humans.

“I expect that by the end of this year, you will start using systems that learn as you use them — this is a natural evolution. Partly why massive investments in hardware are justified: such reasoning models are orders of magnitude more expensive than regular search, requiring more electricity and queries. The recursive story has already begun,” Schmidt highlighted.

In his view, AI agents and breakthroughs in machine reasoning will completely transform workflows across all areas of human activity. Governments and officials do not fully grasp the scale of potential consequences. Governments are utterly unprepared for the speed of upcoming changes, the engineer emphasizes.

Within a decade, an intelligence will emerge that is smarter than all humans combined. It will be able to prove theories that humanity cannot comprehend.

“When people see this, some may take up arms, so frightened will they be. I think this will happen within a decade,” predicted the former Google CEO.

The emergence of such intelligent artificial intelligence raises fundamental questions about preserving democracy, national security, and politics. However, Schmidt believes there is no bubble in the sector, despite the rapid pace of data center construction.

The expert describes AI as an “infinitely scalable” field — without strict growth limits. It may seem that data has run out, but this is not the case.

Schmidt also commented on the US-China race. He noted that in the States, due to vast capital, companies often close source code and build colossal data centers and services. In China, on the contrary, open AI models are being developed with government support. The result is that open software will spread worldwide, but America and the West will lead in quality.

In August, Google announced a global expansion of AI Mode — a search feature that allows users to ask complex and clarifying questions for deeper topic exploration. Additionally, agent and personalized capabilities have been added to the tool.