--- title: "Godfather of AI Predicts Total Breakdown of Society" description: "British computer scientist and AI \"godfather\" Geoffrey Hinton predicts the disastrous effects AI will have on our fragile society." date: "2025-11-25" modified: "2025-11-25" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/godfather-ai-breakdown-society" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # Godfather of AI Predicts Total Breakdown of Society ![British computer scientist and AI "godfather" Geoffrey Hinton predicts the disastrous effects AI will have on our fragile society.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Jorge Uzon / AFP via Getty Images* Geoffrey Hinton, one of the three so-called "godfathers" of AI, never misses an opportunity to issue foreboding proclamations about the tech he helped create. During an [hour-long public conversation]() with Senator Bernie Sanders at Georgetown University last week, the British computer science laid out all the alarming ways that he forecasts AI will completely upend society for the worst, seemingly leaving little room for human contrivances like optimism. One of the reasons why is that AI's rapid deployment will be completely unlike technological revolutions in the past, which created new classes of jobs, he said. "The people who lose their jobs won't have other jobs to go to," Hinton said, [as quoted by *Business Insider*](). "If AI gets as smart as people — or smarter — any job they might do can be done by AI." "These guys are really betting on AI replacing a lot of workers," Hinton added. Hinton pioneered the deep learning techniques that are foundational to the generative AI models fueling the AI boom today. His work on neural networks earned him a Turing Award in 2018, alongside University of Montreal researcher Yoshua Bengio and the former chief AI scientist at Meta [Yann LeCun](). The trio are considered to be the "godfathers" of AI. All three scientists have been outspoken about the tech's risks, to varying degrees. But it was Hinton who first began to turn the most heads when he said he regretted his life's work after [stepping down from his role at Google]() in 2023. He hasn't changed his tune since then. He has consistently warned that AI [will destroy jobs and create massive unemployment](). This month, Hinton then injected more fatalism into this prediction by opining that the AI industry [couldn't turn a profit without replacing human labor](). In his discussion with Sanders, Hinton reiterated these risks, adding that the multibillionaires spearheading AI, like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison haven't really "thought through" the fact that "if the workers don't get paid, there's nobody to buy their products," he said, per *BI*. Previously, Hinton has said it wouldn't be "inconceivable" that [humankind gets wiped out by AI](). He also believes we're not that far away from achieving an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a hypothetical AI system with human or superhuman levels of intelligence that is able to perform a vast array of tasks, which the AI industry is obsessed with building. "Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI," Hinton [said]() in 2023. "And now I think it may be 20 years or less." Strikingly, Hinton now claims that the latest models like OpenAI's GPT-5 "know thousands of times more than us already." While leading large language models are trained on a corpus of data vastly exceeding what a human could ever learn, many experts would disagree that this means that the AI actually "knows" what it's talking about. Moreover, many efforts to replace workers with semi-autonomous models called AI agents [have often failed embarrassingly](), including in [customer support roles]() that many predicted were the most vulnerable to being outmoded. In other words, it's not quite set in stone that the tech will be to so easily replace even low-paying jobs. Nonetheless, never put it past your overlords to find a way how to screw you over anyway. AI machines could be a great tool for carrying out imperial actions abroad; deploying AI robots to fight overseas would be great for the US military industrial complex, Hinton argued, since there wouldn't be dead soldiers to cause "political blowback." "I think it will remove one of the main barriers to rich powerful countries just invading little countries like Granada," Hinton told Sanders. **More on AI:** [*Mark Zuckerberg Accused of Doing Unforgivable Things to Teens on Meta*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()