Less than 0 sum ...

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Geoffrey Hinton is a guy I respect. Brilliant, humble and ethical, he speaks the truth about AI and how the tech he helped to invent is amoral to the nth degree just as creativity and science are as it depends on who uses the entity in question, not the entity itself and what he is saying is all too true in terms of how greed invites stupidity to occur in truly astonishing ways.

To whit.

Let me translate what Geoffrey Hinton just said, because it’s important and most people are going to miss it.

Geoffrey Hinton literally invented the neural networks that power modern AI. He won a Nobel Prize for it. And this week, he went on Bloomberg TV and said something that tech CEOs have been dancing around for months:

Tech companies cannot profit from their AI investments without replacing human workers.

Not “might replace.” Not “could eventually replace.” Cannot profit without replacing.

That’s not a prediction. That’s him explaining the business model.

Here’s Hinton’s point in plain English:

Tech giants are spending $420 billion next year on AI infrastructure. Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon. They’re building data centers, buying AI chips, training massive models.

That money only makes sense if AI replaces workers.

Think about it. If you spend $100 billion building AI systems, how do you make that money back?

You can’t just sell slightly better products. You need massive cost savings. And the biggest cost in any company is labor.

So the business case for AI isn’t “AI will help workers be more productive.” It’s “AI will replace workers entirely, and we’ll pocket the salary savings.”

Hinton is saying what everyone in Silicon Valley knows but won’t say publicly: the whole AI investment thesis depends on job elimination.

Now lets think about this. Question, corporate X fires 30,000 workers to increase the bottom line and cover the expenses of using AI to terminate said jobs. Excellent is it not but ... can the now newly fired 30.000 buy the services or products said corporate X offers? I thought so. 

Ouroboros drawing from a late medieval Byzantine Greek alchemical manuscript.