A top AI boffin has called for humans to be paid a universal basic wage as robots are set to swipe millions of jobs.
Former Google vice president Geoffrey Hinton said the rise of the bots will be “very bad for society”.
He fears armies of workers left jobless by technology will have no chance of sharing in the wealth from the boom in productivity. Hinton said: “I certainly believe in a universal basic income.
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“But I don’t think that’s enough because a lot of people get their self-respect from the jobs they do. If you pay everybody a universal basic income, that solves the problem of them starving and not being able to pay the rent but that doesn’t solve the self-respect problem.”
The expert said he had raised the idea of universal basic income at Downing Street.
He also warned millions of blue-collar and “mid-level intellectual jobs” will be lost to AI.
But he predicted that trades such as plumbing could be safe from the march of the robots for now.
He added: “My best bet about a job that is safe is plumbing, because at these things, AI isn’t yet very good at physical manipulation.
“That will probably be the last thing they are very good at.”
The former Google boss quit in 2023 to raise the alarm about the rise of AI.
He said he was pleased the world was now viewing it as an “existential threat”.
The International Monetary Fund has predicted 40% of jobs worldwide will be hit by AI.
Experts at the Institute for Public Policy Research have also said eight million jobs in the UK could be lost due to the introduction of AI in the workplace.
Tomorrow, (Tuesday, May 21) PM Rishi Sunak will co-host a virtual session of world leaders and tech bosses with President Yoon Suk Yeol of Korea.
He is set to call on nations to work together to ensure AI is safe.
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