'Godfather Of AI' Has A Grim Prediction For Jobs In 2026

The rapid advancement of AI has been remarkable to behold. While you'd need a crystal ball to determine exactly what is in store for the future, those best positioned to comment on the potential impact of AI are those deeply entrenched in its world. There are few more fitting candidates on that front than the so-called "Godfather of AI" himself: Geoffrey Hinton. In 2024, Hinton was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for "foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks." A British-born scientist working at Canada's University of Toronto, he essentially laid the foundation for machine learning models. Yet even he is shocked at just how far things have come in the field. 

Speaking to CNN in December 2025, the scientist was asked what he thought the technology would be capable of in 2026. He remarked, "we're going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs." He highlighted the fact that AI is already replacing workers in call centers, but that it's advancing and becoming incredibly prominent in all kinds of fields. "Each seven months or so," he went on, "it gets to be able to do tasks that are about twice as long."  Hinton uses the example of coding, suggesting that "a minute's worth of coding" has grown to "projects that are, like, an hour long." The advancement of this suggests that "in a few year's time, it'll be able to do software engineering projects that are months long, and then there'll be very few people needed for software engineering projects." There are still some big problems with AI coding that seem to be getting worse, but if they can be rectified, there's a big concern.

In Geoffrey Hinton's view, some designers of chatbots and other AI systems aren't displaying enough humility in the face of this extraordinary technology. In the same CNN interview, he noted that "initially, OpenAI was very concerned with the risks, but ... progressively moved away from that and put less emphasis on safety and more emphasis on profit."

The professor certainly has some authority to predict where 2026 may take AI, but he is not the only authority on the subject. Nor does everybody in the industry strictly agree. There are those who have a similarly grim outlook on the future, with RethinkX director of research Adam Dorr telling The Guardian in July 2025 that "there will remain a niche for human labor in some domains," but "the problem is that there are nowhere near enough of those occupations to employ 4 billion people." Speaking to the newspaper, however, Dorr went on to say that this freed up time could help humanity live "meaningful, purposeful lives" and "find meaning in our relationships with our friends and family and our connections to our communities."  

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO and another one of the most recognizable faces in global AI, has said he believes the job market will change considerably. In a Bloomberg interview in May 2025, he said he expects AI will change some jobs and take others away, but that it will also "create a bunch of new ones." With AI able to help design a CPU, for example, there's no telling how far the technology might ultimately go. 

Geoffrey Hinton highlighted coding as a field in which AI was rapidly advancing, which means it could replace professionals in the field. Of course, it's not the only field, though. In August 2025, Microsoft released a report that explored the impact of AI and predicted which fields would be most influenced by it. According to the research, these were interpreters and translators, historians, and passenger attendants.

However, Microsoft noted that this doesn't necessarily mean that these fields are the most at risk of being taken over by AI. A post on the Microsoft Research Blog written by the researchers reminded readers, "in the paper, we explicitly cautioned against using our findings to make that conclusion." The researchers looked at the ways people are using AI tools, specifically by examining which activities were most often assigned to over 200,000 Microsoft Bing Copilot "anonymized and privacy-scrubbed conversations." They combined this data with AI applicability scores they assigned to each profession based on the sorts of tasks each requires.

The idea, per Microsoft, was more to determine fields in which AI chatbots may be of more importance or support. Some may point to the alarming pattern of losses that have already occurred, but as Yale University Budget Lab executive director Martha Gimbel put it to the BBC in October 2025, "this conversation feels very different to people because the phrase AI is in it ... so far, nothing that I've seen looks different than typical patterns of companies hiring and firing, particularly at this point in an economic cycle."