People often ask me whether I think artificial intelligence will one day “take over” from humans, says Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “godfather of AI”, on The Diary of a CEO. The truth is “I just don’t know”. The short-term risks of the technology are real, and myriad: autonomous weapons killing the wrong target; bad actors designing new biological weapons; cyber criminals running rampant (“phishing” attacks rose 1,200% between 2023 and 2024, probably because of AI). But on the big question of whether the machines will eventually get so smart that they decide they don’t need us, and destroy humanity by, say, spreading a horrible virus? It’s hard to say. AI is like a “nice little tiger cub” – it’s cute and cuddly now, but we have to train it so it doesn’t want to kill us when it grows up. All things considered, I’d put the likelihood that AI will “wipe us out” at between 10% and 20%.

What’s worrying is that even if we do manage to develop the technology in a safe way, the societal effects could still be devastating. For those who do “knowledge work” – everything from call centre employees to accountants and lawyers – AI is going to replace basically everybody. You’ll have one human with an AI assistant doing the work that previously required 10 humans. People argue that new types of jobs will emerge, as happened with previous technological breakthroughs. But what jobs? With any work requiring a computer, you’ll have to be extraordinarily skilled to outperform AI. There will hopefully be ways governments can address this mass unemployment – a universal basic income, say. Will people be satisfied with that? My advice to young folks: “train to be a plumber”.

🤖👋 The job destruction has already started, say Chip Cutter and Lauren Weber in The Wall Street Journal. Procter & Gamble is cutting 7,000 jobs – or 15% of its non-manufacturing workforce – to create “broader roles and smaller teams”. Estée Lauder and dating-app operator Match Group each recently jettisoned around 20% of their managers. Microsoft plans to lay off thousands of employees in its sales department and other teams in the coming weeks. The main reason for all this, as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told his own soon-to-be-sacked employees on Tuesday: the “once-in-a-lifetime” rise of AI.

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If Geoff Hinton’s despondence over AI fills you with gloom, the rest of today’s email includes some charming anecdotes from the golden age of Hollywood and an American’s love letter to the English strawberry. There’s also a fascinating look at the history of Iran’s nuclear programme, which explains why whoever’s in charge in Tehran will always want the bomb.

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