Real Alpha
Watch modeSubscribed

The Diary Of A CEO · 3 min · Jun 16, 2025

Basic income may not replace the dignity of work

Geoffrey Hinton says automation could widen the gap between AI owners and displaced workers. He sees basic income as a start, but not a substitute for purpose and status tied to a job.

Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton is a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist.

Nobel-winning pioneer of backpropagation and deep learning, now warning publicly about AI's existential risks.

About this segment

Geoffrey Hinton says automation could widen the gap between AI owners and displaced workers. He sees basic income as a start, but not a substitute for purpose and status tied to a job.

From “Godfather of AI: They Keep Silencing Me But I’m Trying to Warn Them!”, Jun 16, 2025. Watch the full episode

Answers “Which jobs will AI replace, and which are safe?” See all 42 answers

“But for a lot of people, their dignity is tied up with their job.”
Geoffrey Hintonat 55:55 · The Diary Of A CEO55:55

Takeaways

  1. AI users and providers could capture productivity gains.
  2. Hinton calls universal basic income a good start.
  3. Income alone may not restore purpose or social standing.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 39:42AI could replace far more workers than past technologies3:08
  2. 12:02AI makes cyberattacks easier, so Hinton spreads his savings3:55
  3. 1:25:46A CEO expects AI agents to shrink his workforce to 3,0002:21
  4. 17:18Personal data can enable targeted election manipulation4:58
  5. 25:56Autonomous weapons could lower the cost of invasion3:49

  6. 53:56Basic income may not replace the dignity of work2:32

Up next · LightconeScale moved from narrow data markets into AI applications5:34

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 54:02

    midterm impact potentially on your nephews and your your kids in terms of their jobs as well yeah i'm concerned about all that are there any particular industries that you think are most at risk people talk about the creative industries a lot and it's sort of knowledge work they talk about lawyers and accountants and stuff like that. Yeah, so that's why I mentioned plumbers. I think plumbers are less at risk.

  2. 54:20

    Okay, I'm going to become a plumber. Someone like a legal assistant, a paralegal, they're not going to be needed for very long. And is there a wealth inequality issue here that will rise from this? Yeah, I think in a society which shared out things fairly, if you get a big increase in productivity, everybody should be better off. But if you can replace lots of people by AIs, then the people who get replaced will be worse off, and the company that supplies the AIs will be much better off, and the company that uses the AIs.

  3. 55:01

    So it's going to increase the gap between rich and poor. And we know that if you look at that gap between rich and poor, that basically tells you how nice a society is. If you have a big gap, you get very nasty societies in which people live in wall communities and put other people in mass jails. It's not good to increase the gap between rich and poor. The International Monetary Fund has expressed profound concerns that generative AI could cause massive labour disruptions and rising inequality, and has called...

  4. 55:31

    policies that prevent this from happening. I read that in the Business Insider. Have they given any idea what the policies should look like? No. Yeah, that's the problem. I mean, if AI can make everything much more efficient and get rid of people for most jobs, or have a person assisted by AI doing many, many people's work, it's not obvious what to do about it. Universal basic income? Give everybody money?

  5. 55:56

    Yeah, I think that's a good start. And it stops people starving. But for a lot of people, their dignity is tied up with their job. I mean, who you think you are is tied up with you doing this job, right? And if we said, we'll give you the same money just to sit around, that would impact your dignity. You said something earlier about it surpassing or being superior to human intelligence. A lot of people, I think,