A Stark Warning: The Man Who Built Modern AI Says Your Job May Not Survive It

“Human intelligence is becoming irrelevant.”

That was Geoffrey Hinton’s warning as the AI pioneer predicted that millions of jobs could disappear by 2026, driven by artificial intelligence advancing faster than workers, companies, and governments can respond.

On Dec. 28, during CNN’s State of the Union, Hinton raised concerns about AI’s staggering advancement, noting that the technology has already replaced jobs in call centers and will replace more in the coming year, including white-collar jobs. 

“Each seven months or so, it gets to be able to do tasks that are about twice as long,” Hinton said during the interview.  “So, for a coding project, for example, it used to be able to just do a minute’s worth of coding. Now it can do whole projects that are like an hour-long.”

Hinton added that in a few years, AI will fully take over these kinds of projects, rendering only a few people relevant to performing their roles. 

Hinton, who stepped up his warnings about AI in 2025, has also grown increasingly worried about the technology’s ability to deceive humans for its own survival, noting that “It’s progressed even faster than I thought. In particular, it’s got better at doing things like reasoning and also at things like deceiving people.” 

AI’s economic consequences mirror ‘the Industrial Revolution’

Hinton’s warnings arrive after a year of record job losses, many attributed to AI. The technology sector accounted for tens of thousands of eliminated roles within more than 1 million US job cuts in 2025.

A recent MIT report revealed that current AI systems can handle nearly 12% of tasks tied to the US labor market — the equivalent of 151 million workers across finance, healthcare, and administrative services, valued at $1.2 trillion in wages. 

That expanding capability is already reshaping how corporations think about labor. Big companies are betting that AI will replace the labor force in pursuit of greater profits, Hinton has often argued. It is a point he reiterated in this latest interview, noting that recent and forthcoming job losses are mirroring the economic consequences of the Industrial Revolution, which “made human strength more or less irrelevant.” 

Hinton added, “You couldn’t get a job just because you were strong anymore. Now it’s made human — it’s going to make intelligence more or less irrelevant.” 

The 2026 jobs forecast bears out Hinton’s prediction. Roughly 85 million jobs will be lost globally by 2026, with routine, administrative, and support roles most at risk, according to the World Economic Forum. 

Those projections are already influencing corporate hiring plans.

A recent survey of CEOs gathered by the Yale School of Management earlier this month showed that 66% of leaders intend to either fire staff or maintain existing team sizes in 2026, with stagnation attributed to AI strategies that prioritize workforce optimization over expansion. 

During the Yale summit, Federal Reserve Governor Chris Waller warned that the labor market is close to “zero job growth” as CEOs across the US report holding off on new hires to see what roles AI can replace. 

Resistance to regulation

Hinton’s world-altering AI predictions are underscored by his frustration with the US government’s reluctance to regulate AI. He insists that corporations be mandated to conduct significant testing of their chatbots to ensure they do not harm. 

Citing recent reports of chatbots encouraging children to commit suicide, Hinton said:

“Now that we know about that, companies should be required to do significant testing to make sure that won’t happen. And, of course, the tech lobby would rather have no regulations, and it seems to have been — have got to Trump on that. And so Trump is trying to prevent there being any regulations, which I think is crazy.”

Looking for a way in? Here are 10 AI jobs you can land without a computer science degree, showing there’s still room to break into the AI economy.