DeepMind
- A co-founder of DeepMind, the AI company bought by Google in 2014, warned about AI-related job losses.
- Mustafa Suleyman said at a San Francisco conference that there will be "a serious number of losers."
- He said that universal basic income could be the answer.
A co-founder of the AI company DeepMind has warned that governments will need to figure out a plan to compensate people who will lose their jobs to the new technology, the Financial Times reported.
"Unquestionably, many of the tasks in white collar land will look very different in the next five to 10 years," Mustafa Suleyman said at GIC's Bridge Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday, per the FT. "There are going to be a serious number of losers [and they] will be very unhappy, very agitated."
DeepMind was bought by Google in 2014, and has helped it develop large language models similar to ChatGPT called LaMDA and PaLM. Suleyman left DeepMind last January, before setting up his own chatbot business called Inflection AI.
Suleyman said that governments need to give "material compensation" to people who will lose their jobs due to AI, per the FT. "This is a political and economic measure we have to start talking about in a serious way," he said.
Recent research from Goldman Sachs suggested that 300 million full-time jobs could be impacted by AI, with legal and administrative workers at the most risk.
Suleyman said Tuesday that universal basic income could be a potential solution to this. UBI would give every citizen a guaranteed income with no strings attached.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, told The Wall Street Journal in March that he believed AI could free up people to pursue more creative work with UBI compensating lost jobs.
And in 2019, Elon Musk also said he supported Andrew Yang's signature UBI policy of $1,000 a month, which the politician called a "Freedom Dividend."