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- AI pioneer Stuart Russell warns leaders are “staring 80% unemployment in the face.”
- Russell says AI may replace surgeons, coders, and even CEOs as firms chase efficiency.
- He fears a future where machines do all work, leaving humans struggling to find purpose.
After more than 40 years of studying AI, UC Berkeley professor Stuart Russell hasn’t mellowed.
The man who co-authored “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” the world’s most authoritative textbook on AI, now spends up to 100 hours a week trying to avert what he sees as a historic crisis — one that could leave almost the entire global population without work.
Russell, one of the world’s most influential AI researchers and a recipient of the OBE — a royal honor awarded by the UK — for his contributions to computer science, told British entrepreneur Steven Bartlett on the “Diary of a CEO” podcast posted on Thursday that the economic shock ahead is far bigger than governments realize.
‘80% unemployment’ is no longer a sci-fi scenario
Russell said political leaders are “suddenly staring 80% unemployment in the face” as AI systems accelerate toward replacing abilities once reserved for the highest-skilled humans.
“AI systems are doing pretty much everything we currently call work,” he said. That includes fields once believed to be safe from automation.
“Anything you might aspire to — you want to become a surgeon — it takes the robot seven seconds to learn how to be a surgeon that’s better than any human being,” he added.
He suggested that sectors once considered safe — from driving and logistics to accounting, software engineering, and even medicine — are likely to be swept up in the coming wave of automation.
Russell joins a growing chorus of AI experts and tech leaders in forecasting historic levels of job displacement.
While Andrew Yang has warned AI could wipe out 40 million US jobs in the next decade, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted up to half of entry-level white-collar roles could disappear within five years.
Others, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Yann LeCun, Meta’s outgoing chief AI scientist, believe AI will transform work rather than erase it.
Why CEOs could be replaced, too
The disruption won’t stop at the top. Russell said even senior executives won’t be spared.
“Pity the poor CEO whose board says, ‘Unless you turn over your decision-making power to the AI system, we’re going to have to fire you because all our competitors are using an AI-powered CEO and they’re doing much better.'”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have both echoed these thoughts in recent interviews.
“I think what a CEO does is maybe one of the easier things for an AI to do one day,” Pichai told the BBC last month.
Companies are already cutting jobs because of AI.
HP, IBM, Salesforce, and Klarna have also cited AI as a factor in sweeping layoffs or workforce reductions announced over the past year.
“Even the giant AI companies will have few human employees in the long run,” Russell said.
A world where work disappears — and meaning must be reinvented
Russell believes that even if AI advances safely, the bigger challenge may be psychological. Humans derive purpose from striving, problem-solving, and contributing to others, he said.
A society where machines handle all productive tasks could drift toward a future in which humans become passive, sedentary consumers living for entertainment — a scenario he describes as “not conducive to human flourishing.”
“We need to figure out what is the next phase going to be like,” he said, and “how in this world do we have the incentives to become fully human, which I think means at least a level of education that people have now and probably more.”
So far, he added, nobody — not AI researchers, not economists, not science fiction writers, not futurists — has convincingly described that world.