RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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The long-term impact of AI is one of the most hotly debated topics in Silicon Valley. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts every job will be transformed—and likely lead to a four-day workweek. Other tech titans go even further: Bill Gates says humans may soon not be needed “for most things,” and Elon Musk believes most humans won’t have to work at all in “less than 20 years.”
While those predictions might sound extreme, they’re not just plausible, they’re likely, said Geoffrey Hinton , the British computer scientist widely known as the “Godfather of AI.” The transition, he warned, could trigger a sweeping economic reshuffling that leaves millions of workers behind.
“It seems very likely to a large number of people that we will get massive unemployment caused by AI,” Hinton said in a November 2025 discussion with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at Georgetown University.
“And if you ask where are these guys going to get the roughly trillion dollars they’re investing in data centers and chips…one of the main sources of money is going to be by selling people AI that will do the work of workers much cheaper,” he continued. “And so these guys are really betting on AI replacing a lot of workers.”
Hinton has grown increasingly vocal about what he sees as Big Tech’s misplaced priorities. The industry, he previously told Fortune , is driven less by scientific progress than by short-term profits—fueling a push to replace human workers with cheaper AI systems.
His warnings come as the economics of AI face new scrutiny . OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, isn’t expected to turn a profit until at least 2030 and may need more than $207 billion to support its growth, according to HSBC estimations published in November 2025.
The future of AI is behind a fog of war
Hinton’s journey from AI insider to outspoken critic underscores the high stakes of the technology he helped create. After quitting his Google job in 2023 to speak more freely about AI’s risks, he has become one of the most prominent skeptics. Last year, his pioneering work in machine learning earned him the Nobel Prize.
He also acknowledged AI will create new jobs, as many tech leaders predict . But he added he does not expect the number of new roles to come close to the number eliminated. Even so, he cautioned that all predictions—including his own—should be treated with heavy skepticism.
“Trying to predict the future of it is going to be very difficult,” Hinton told Sanders. “It’s a bit like when you drive in fog. You can see clearly for 100 yards and at 200 yards you can see nothing. Well, we can see clearly for a year or two, but 10 years out, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”
What is clear, however, is that AI isn’t going away, and experts say workers who adapt —and use the technology to amplify their skills—will stand the best chance of navigating the coming upheaval.
100 million jobs are at risk, Bernie Sanders warns
Sanders has attempted to quantify the stakes. In a report released in October 2025 —based partly on estimates generated by ChatGPT—he warned nearly 100 million U.S. jobs could be displaced by automation. Workers in fast food, customer service, and manual labor face some of the highest risks, but white-collar roles in accounting , software development, and nursing could also see significant cuts.
“It’s not just economics,” Sanders wrote in an op-ed for Fox News . “Work, whether being a janitor or a brain surgeon, is an integral part of being human. The vast majority of people want to be productive members of society and contribute to their communities. What happens when that vital aspect of human existence is removed from our lives?”
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) has raised similar alarms, warning the disruption could hit young people first and hardest—potentially driving unemployment among recent college graduates to as high as 25% in the next two to three years.
“Let’s look at the fact we never did anything on social media,” Warner told CNBC . “If we make that same response on AI and don’t put guardrails, I think we will come to rue that day.”
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on December 4, 2025.
More on the future of work
Jensen Huang says this is the greatest time in history to start a business—and his advice is to stop overthinking it: ‘How hard can it be?’
Crypto billionaire Michael Saylor says he made $15 billion last year with ChatGPT—and has one rule: ‘Don’t try to outwork the robots’
Mark Zuckerberg says the future will have an ‘abundance of jobs’ —and predicts a wave of new careers like world builders and personal biologists
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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