- Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis predicted AI smarter than humans will help us “colonize the galaxy,” in as soon as 5 years—but it won’t be the job-killer people fear it is. Rather, he said that the advanced models will usher in a new “golden era”; and others like Bill Gates and Marc Benioff agree that AI will radically change the world of work.
CEOs and the working class are very divided on how AI will shake up the world. Leaders tout the promise of an enhanced work-life, while employees question the future of their jobs. The CEO of Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind, has a more abstract line of thinking: galaxy exploration and “superhumans”—and perhaps sooner than you may expect.
“If everything goes well, then we should be in an era of radical abundance, a kind of golden era,” chief executive Demis Hassabis told Wired in a recent interview.
The AI leader said artificial general intelligence (AGI)—algorithms that are just as smart as humans—will be the driving force of this revolution. He said the $600 million giant is “dead on track” to possibly create that technology in the next five to 10 years.
While AI agents, chatbots, and copilots are already outperforming human workers, it begs the question of whether advanced AGI models will usher in a jobs armageddon.
The DeepMind CEO hit back at that claim: “What generally tends to happen is new jobs are created that utilize new tools or technologies and are actually better,” he insisted. “We’ll have these incredible tools that supercharge our productivity and actually almost make us a little bit superhuman.”
“If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030.”
The ‘golden era’ of the 2030s: space exploration and supercharged workers
The DeepMind CEO is dead-set that advanced AI models will bring about a renaissance in human existence. The “golden era” is only five short years away.
“AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources,” Hassabis said.
While the tech executive has rosy predictions for the future, others are already warning of the growing pains ahead. Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI company Anthropic, predicted that 50% of entry-level roles could be automated in half a decade, which could send unemployment rates soaring to between 10% and 20%. LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer Aneesh Raman said that technological disruption will first break the bottom rung of the career ladder.
However, Hassabis said he hasn’t personally witnessed much outcry about an AI jobs takeover. Instead, he purported that these new tools will turbocharge human productivity. Take healthcare, for example, he added that roles will be aided by AI, rather than replaced.
“There’s a lot of things that we won’t want to do with a machine,” he said. “You wouldn’t want a robot nurse—there’s something about the human empathy aspect of that care that’s particularly humanistic.”
Fortune reached out to DeepMind for comment.
Tech CEOs on what the future of work will look like in an AI world
Other technology bigwigs agree that AI will change the future of work—but differ in the way they think it’ll rewrite the rules. Billionaire Bill Gates expects a utopian society where humans have all the grunt work off their plates, giving way to a shorter workweek.
“What will jobs be like? Should we just work like 2 or 3 days a week?” the Microsoft co-founder told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show in March.
At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff shared his predictions on the future of work; that he, and many of the other leaders sitting in the room, would be the last cohort of executives to helm all-human workforces. Employees will soon rub shoulders with AI agents and robots, and executives need to know how to lead in that new reality.
“From this point forward…we will be managing not only human workers but also digital workers,” Benioff said during a panel at the event.
Indeed CEO Chris Hyams agrees with the DeepMind CEO that AI won’t eliminate a lot of jobs, but stipulates there will be a new set of desired skills. For the last decade, it’s all been about technical capabilities: cloud engineering, software coding, data science, and cybersecurity. But now that AI can crunch the numbers and write its own code, soft skills are more valuable.
“Every job is going to change pretty radically, and I think many of them in the next year,” Hyams said, explaining that empathy will be a sought-after skill alongside “having a curiosity and an openness and maybe even a veracity to learn new things.”
