‘Godfather of AI’ warns software engineering jobs could shrink sharply in 2026: ‘There’ll be very few people needed…’

AI open up Geoffrey Hinton has erst over again raised alert bells near the dangers posed by the new technology, highlighting how the progress being made could lead to a severe job loss crisis among other issues in 2026. Hinton also reiterated his warning that there is a 10–20% chance that AI takes over the world, calling it a “very real fear” shared by him and many other people in the tech world.

During an interview with CNN on Sunday, Hinton, when asked if he is more or less worried about the future of AI, said, “I'm probably more worried. It's progressed even faster than I thought. In particular, it's gotten better at doing things like reasoning and also at things like deceiving people.”

Godfather of AI says AI will replace many jobs in 2026:

When asked how he sees AI impacting the world in 2026, Hinton said, “We're going to see AI get even better. It's already extremely good.”

“We're going to see AI get even better. It's already extremely good,” he added. “It's already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it's going to be able to replace many other jobs.”

“Each seven months or so, it gets to be able to do tasks that are about twice as long,” he further noted.

Hinton said AI used to be able to do minutes’ worth of coding, but can now create “whole projects that are like an hour long.”

“In a few years' time, it'll be able to do software engineering projects that are months long, and then there'll be very few people needed for software engineering projects,” Hinton warned.

Positives from AI:

Hinton also agreed with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's assessment that AI is the “single most impactful technology of our time.” He also went on to talk about some of the positives that the technology is going to bring for humanity.

“So there are a lot of wonderful effects of AI. It'll make healthcare much better. It'll make education much better. It'll enable us to design wonderful new drugs and wonderful new materials that may deal with climate change,” Hinton said.

“In more or less any industry where you want to predict something, it'll do a really good job. It'll do better than people were doing before, even things like the weather,” he noted.

Are companies worried about the risks of AI?

When asked if the companies that are working on AI are worried about the potential risks that their technology could entail, Hinton said it depends on each company. For instance, he noted that OpenAI was “very concerned with the risks,” but has now moved away from that to put “more emphasis on profit.”

As for Meta, he said the company has “always been very concerned with profit and less with safety.”

Anthropic, in his assessment, was “very concerned with safety and they still are probably the company most concerned with safety,” but he added that they are now also trying to make a profit.

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