Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s AI research arm DeepMind and a Nobel Prize laureate, isn’t too worried about an AI “jobpocalypse.”
Instead of fretting over AI replacing jobs, he’s worried about the technology falling into the wrong hands – and a lack of guardrails to keep sophisticated, autonomous AI models under control.
“Both of those risks are important, challenging ones,” he said in an interview with CNN’s Anna Stewart at the SXSW festival in London, which takes place this week.
Last week, the CEO of high-profile AI lab Anthropic had a stark warning about the future of the job landscape, claiming that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs. But Hassabis said he’s most concerned about the potential misuse of what AI developers call “artificial general intelligence,” a theoretical type of AI that would broadly match human-level intelligence.
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“A bad actor could repurpose those same technologies for a harmful end,” he said. “And so one big thing is… how do we restrict access to these systems, powerful systems to bad actors…but enable good actors to do many, many amazing things with it?”
Hackers have used AI to generate voice messages impersonating US government officials, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a May public advisory. A report commissioned by the US State Department last year found that AI could pose “catastrophic” national security risks, CNN reported. AI has also facilitated the creation of deepfake pornography — though the Take It Down Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last month, aims to stop the proliferation of these deepfakes by making it illegal to share nonconsensual explicit images online.
Hassabis isn’t the first to call out such concerns. But his comments further underscore both the promise of AI and the alarm that it brings as the technology gets better at handling complex tasks like writing code and generating video clips. While AI has been heralded as one of the biggest technological advancements since the internet, it also gives scammers and other malicious actors more tools than ever before. And it’s rapidly advancing without much regulation as the United States and China race to establish dominance in the field.
Google removed language from its AI ethics policy website in February, pledging not to use AI for weapons and surveillance.
Hassabis believes there should be an international agreement on the fundamentals of how AI should be utilized and how to ensure the technology is only used “for the good use cases.”
“Obviously, it’s looking difficult at present day with the geopolitics as it is,” he said. “But, you know, I hope that as things will improve, and as AI becomes more sophisticated, I think it’ll become more clear to the world that that needs to happen.”
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The DeepMind CEO also believes we’re headed toward a future in which people use AI “agents” to execute tasks on their behalf, a vision Google is working towards by integrating more AI into its search function and developing AI-powered smart glasses.
“We sometimes call it a universal AI assistant that will go around with you everywhere, help you in your everyday life, do mundane admin tasks for you, but also enrich your life by recommending you amazing things, from books and films to maybe even friends to meet,” he said.
New AI models are showing progress in areas like video generation and coding, adding to fears that the technology could eliminate jobs.
“AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CNN just after telling Axios that AI could axe entry-level jobs. In April, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expects AI to write half the company’s code by 2026.
However, an AI-focused future is closer to promise than reality. AI is still prone to shortcomings like bias and hallucinations, which have sparked a handful of high-profile mishaps for the companies using the technology. The Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, published an AI-generated summer reading list including nonexistent books last month.
While Hassabis says AI will change the workforce, he doesn’t believe AI will render jobs obsolete. Like some others in the AI space, he believes the technology could result in new types of jobs and increase productivity. But he also acknowledged that society will likely have to adapt and find some way of “distributing all the additional productivity that AI will produce in the economy.”
He compared AI to the rise of other technological changes, like the internet.
“There’s going to be a huge amount of change,” he said. “Usually what happens is new, even better jobs arrive to take the place of some of the jobs that get replaced. We’ll see if that happens this time.”