Co-Founder of Google's DeepMind on the Future of Jobs: AI Systems Are 'Labor Replacing Tools'

Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of Google’s AI powerhouse DeepMind, has voiced concerns about the long-term impact of artificial intelligence on labor markets, highlighting its potential to replace human labor.

Fortune reports that Mustafa Suleyman, a notable figure in the AI industry and co-founder of the AI firm DeepMind, recently shared his views on the future implications of AI, particularly its effect on the labor market. Suleyman, who founded DeepMind in 2010 alongside Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg and later sold it to Google for £400 million in 2014, spoke at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, attends a press event to announce Google as the new official partner of the Women’s National Team at Google Berlin. (Photo by Christoph Soeder/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Suleyman highlighted two primary ways AI could transform businesses: by making operations more efficient, leading to significant cost savings but often at the expense of human jobs, and by enabling the creation of entirely new operations and processes, which could potentially lead to job creation. However, he cautioned that these changes would significantly disrupt the labor market in the coming years, with the long-term impact remaining uncertain.

“In the long term…we have to think very hard about how we integrate these tools, because left completely to the market and to their own devices, these are fundamentally labor replacing tools,” Suleyman told CNBC.

The debate over AI’s role in the job market is not new. Some experts, like Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, have raised alarms with studies suggesting a high risk of job automation. For instance, their 2013 study estimated that 47 percent of US jobs might be automated by the mid-2030s. Conversely, other studies, like a 2022 report from the United Nations’ International Labor Organization, have suggested that AI will more likely complement human workers than replace them.

Suleyman also commented on the issue of “hallucinations” in generative AI systems, where AI exaggerates or fabricates facts, which poses additional challenges. This aligns with concerns raised by other experts, like MIT professor Daron Acemoglu, who predicted a mixed impact of AI in 2024, with potential job losses but without significant productivity improvements.

“Generative AI is an impressive technology, and it provides tremendous opportunities for improving productivity in a number of tasks. But because the hype has gone so far ahead of reality, the setbacks of the technology in 2024 will be more memorable,” Acemoglu wrote.

Suleyman highlighted the transformative potential of AI but cautioned against overly optimistic short-term expectations for productivity gains. He stressed the need for thoughtful integration of AI tools into the economy, considering their labor-replacing capabilities and the broader implications for society.