When AI Makes Us All Poorer: Geoffrey Hinton's Warning Hits Too Close to Home
Geoffrey Hinton’s latest warning about AI making “a few people much richer and most people poorer” has been bouncing around in my head for days now. The man who helped birth modern AI is essentially telling us we’ve created a monster that’s going to eat our economic lunch. And honestly? Looking at the conversations swirling around this topic, I’m starting to think he might be understating the problem.
What strikes me most about the online discussions is how many people see this coming and feel utterly powerless to stop it. Someone pointed out that Hinton has upgraded from “AI will kill us all” to “AI will make us all destitute” – which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly cause for celebration. Poverty kills people too, just more slowly and with less dramatic headlines.
The tech industry rhetoric around AI feels increasingly disconnected from reality. We keep hearing about how these tools will make everyone more productive, how they’ll free us from mundane tasks to focus on creative work. But what I’m seeing in practice – and what many others are experiencing – is quite different. Companies are using AI not to make workers’ lives better, but to justify reducing headcount and increasing profits. It’s the same playbook we’ve seen with every technological advancement under capitalism: productivity gains flow upward while job security flows downward.
Working in IT, I’ve watched this pattern repeat itself over decades. Each new wave of automation promises to elevate human work, but mostly it just eliminates human workers. The accounting software that was supposed to free accountants from tedious data entry? It just meant firms needed fewer accountants. The cloud services that were supposed to make system administration more strategic? They mainly made system administrators redundant.
What’s particularly galling is how much of AI development has been built on publicly funded research. Universities, often supported by taxpayer money, laid the groundwork for these technologies. Now private companies are packaging that research into products designed to concentrate wealth and power. It feels like we’re being robbed twice – first when our tax dollars fund the research, then when the benefits are locked away behind corporate paywalls.
The conversations I’ve been reading paint a pretty stark picture of where this is heading. We’re looking at a form of technological feudalism where a small class of AI owners control the means of production while everyone else scrapes for increasingly scarce opportunities. The billionaires pushing this aren’t interested in creating a post-work utopia – they’re interested in eliminating their dependence on workers while maintaining their wealth extraction systems.
What frustrates me most is the fatalism I see creeping into these discussions. Yes, the deck is stacked. Yes, the wealthy have captured our political systems. But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless. Technology is just a tool, and tools can be redirected toward different purposes if we have the will to do it.
The AI revolution doesn’t have to mean dystopia. These technologies could genuinely improve everyone’s quality of life if they were developed and deployed in service of human flourishing rather than profit maximization. Imagine if productivity gains from AI translated into shorter working weeks rather than layoffs. Picture a world where AI-generated abundance meant universal basic services rather than increased inequality.
But getting there requires us to stop treating our current economic system as an immutable law of nature. The same research that created these AI systems could be used to solve resource allocation problems, to coordinate human needs with available resources, to build a more equitable society. Instead, we’re using it to optimize shareholder returns.
I’m not ready to accept Hinton’s prediction as inevitable. But preventing it will require more than individual action or market solutions. It’ll require collective action to reclaim these technologies from the handful of people currently controlling them. Whether that happens through regulation, public ownership, or other means remains to be seen. What’s certain is that doing nothing guarantees the outcome Hinton warns about.
The future isn’t written yet. But if we want it to look different from the dystopia currently being mapped out in Silicon Valley boardrooms, we need to start acting like it.