Nobel laureate predicts wave of unemployment due to AI in 2026 - ForkLog: cryptocurrencies, AI, singularity, future

# Nobel laureate predicts wave of unemployment due to AI in 2026

In 2026, artificial intelligence will become advanced enough to replace a significant number of jobs. Nobel laureate and one of the creators of the technology, Geoffrey Hinton, stated this in an interview with CNN.

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

According to him, neural networks are already capable of replacing call centers. Progress is accelerating: every seven months, the performance of models doubles. In programming, artificial intelligence performs in minutes what used to take hours.

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

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

The Nobel laureate admitted that after leaving Google in 2023, his anxiety only increased. According to Hinton, artificial intelligence is developing faster than expected, especially in its ability to reason and even mislead people to achieve goals.

The scientist does not deny the benefits of technology for medicine and climatology but believes that the world pays insufficient attention to reducing risks.

Cybersecurity approaches vary from company to company, but the overall picture is determined 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 huge, and the risk is statistically small. Why give up a breakthrough because of a few possible casualties? This is the same logic as with driverless cars*: they will have accidents, but the total number of deaths is expected to be orders of magnitude lower than with human drivers,”* said the specialist

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 even richer and most people poorer, the expert believes.

Alternative opinion

Andrew Yoon, co-founder of Google Brain, called artificial intelligence an “extremely limited” technology in a comment to NBC. He is confident that in the foreseeable future, algorithms will not be able to replace humans.

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

Yoon believes that before the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI), comparable to human intelligence, is still far away. 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 some language, preparing data, training artificial intelligence, and mastering that one set takes much more work than is generally assumed,” he noted.

Yoon also criticized calls from some business leaders to stop learning programming due to automation, calling it “the worst career advice.”

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

Potential for programmers

In the professional environment, there is already a strong belief that programming is the epicenter of the AI revolution. As a result, more and more experts predict the disappearance of specialties related to routine coding.

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

He believes that mastering programming skills using artificial intelligence will become a competitive advantage. Such specialists “will become not just more efficient but will also enjoy the process more.”

“We are on the verge of a large-scale social shift when the ability to ‘talk’ to a machine through code will become a new digital literacy,” the expert believes

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

Recall that in November, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that 11.7% of the workforce could be replaced by artificial intelligence.