The “godfather of AI” has a reality check for CEOs.
Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian Nobel Prize winner for his contributions to machine learning, joined Sen. Bernie Sanders for a discussion at Georgetown University on Tuesday about “the promise and the peril” of AI.
Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, kicked off the discussion by asking whether multibillionaires like Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and Larry Ellison, a cofounder of Oracle, have considered the impact on working-class people when making enormous investments in AI and robotics.
“They should be, but I don’t think they are,” Hinton said in response, “And I think many of them haven’t really absorbed canes, that if the workers don’t get paid, there’s nobody to buy their products, and they haven’t really thought through the massive social disruption we’ll get if we get very high unemployment.”
Sanders followed up with the examples of Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, who once predicted that humans won’t be needed for most things, and Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, who more recently said that AI could lead to the loss of half of all entry-level white collar jobs.
Hinton thinks that these predictions “are probably right.”
“So you often see articles saying, ‘oh, AI’s not going to replace jobs, AI fails in lots of things,'” Hinton said. “AI currently does fail in some things. What you have to remember is we’re in the very early stages. This is a new technology. It’s getting better very fast.”
“I don’t believe it’s going to create as many new jobs as it replaces,” Hinton added of AI later in the conversation. “It’ll create jobs like prompt engineer — how do you prompt this chatbot to get the best out of it — but I don’t believe there’ll be nearly as many new jobs created as it destroys, as it replaces.”
Musk, last month, said that AI will replace desk jobs “at an accelerated rate.”
“Ultimately, working will be optional because you’ll have robots plus AI,” he said on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “And we’ll have, in a benign scenario, universal high income, not just universal basic income. Universal high income, meaning anyone can have any products or services that they want, but there will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way.”
Musk is not alone in suggesting that some form of universal basic income be distributed with the wealth created by AI; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also a proponent.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said back in June that AI’s capabilities would allow Amazon to shrink its white-collar workforce in the future. The company laid off 14,000 corporate employees in October, although Jassy attributed the firings to “culture” rather than AI. Earlier in 2025, Shopify and Duolingo both informed their teams that they would need to demonstrate that AI couldn’t perform the roles for which they were hiring before they could request additional head count.
Georgetown students who attended the event seemed acutely aware of the downsides of AI. At the end of the discussion, Sanders asked the audience whether they think AI would benefit their future or harm their prospects. The latter option saw significantly more raised hands.
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