The “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence” Geoffrey Hinton believes that the introduction of a universal basic income could solve the problem of a possible shortage of jobs caused by the development of AI.
Geoffrey Hinton told the BBC he was “very concerned that a lot of simple jobs will be taken over by artificial intelligence.”
“I was consulted by people from Downing Street. I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea,” he said.
Universal basic income refers to regular equal payments to all citizens of the country, regardless of their income, social status, age, or work, without any reciprocal obligations on their part.
Some US cities and states have experimented with implementing a guaranteed basic income, but for certain categories.
According to Hinton, artificial intelligence will improve productivity and increase revenue. But unless the government intervenes, it will only make the rich richer. And it will put the poor out of work.
Hinton advocates a more cautious approach to artificial intelligence development and says artificial intelligence could become an “extinction threat” for humans in five to 20 years.
It’s also worth noting that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is running his own experiment on a universal basic income, the results of which he expects to publish soon. He also recently put forward the idea of “universal core computing.” Instead of receiving cash, everyone could get a piece of a future LLM like GPT-7.
Let us remember that before this, Geoffrey Hinton announced that he was leaving Google. He cited his concern that AI would cause a lot of harm as the reason for this.
For more details, read the full article on Business Insider.