2026 likely to be the year ‘jobless boom’ begins, says Godfather of AI

2026 is now shaping up, not just as another year of AI progress, but as the moment when a long‑feared “jobless boom” could begin, according to Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist widely known as the “Godfather of AI.” In a late‑December 2025 interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Hinton warned that by 2026 AI will have the capabilities to replace “many, many jobs,” pushing companies into a phase where output keeps rising even as hiring stalls.​

What Hinton actually said

In the CNN interview, aired and published on December 28, 2025, Hinton described 2025 as a pivotal year for AI and said 2026 would see systems become “even better” and “already extremely good.” He cautioned that AI will soon have “the capabilities to replace many, many jobs,” noting that it is already able to take over call‑center roles and is rapidly expanding into other white‑collar tasks.​

Hinton highlighted that AI’s task length capacity is effectively doubling roughly every seven months, moving from handling a minute of code to whole projects that take an hour, and soon to software engineering projects that last months, at which point “very few people” will be needed on such teams. For him, this is not a distant scenario but a near‑term risk that begins in earnest around 2026.​

The ‘jobless boom’ idea

The phrase “jobless boom” has been picked up by economists to describe a paradox where AI boosts productivity and profits but does not translate into proportional job growth. KPMG’s chief economist Diane Swonk recently wrote that “growth and labor market outcomes have decoupled,” with firms “doing more with fewer workers” as they lean into automation, attrition and targeted layoffs.​

Indian and global outlets such as Business Today, News18 and Moneycontrol have framed Hinton’s CNN comments as a warning that this jobless productivity boom “may start as soon as 2026,” especially in white‑collar and software roles. Explainers from Startuppedia and other platforms describe the jobless boom as a phase where companies produce more using machines instead of people, resulting in higher output and lower costs but stagnant or shrinking hiring.​

Sectors and roles in the firing line

Early displacement is already visible in call centres, routine customer support and other standardized service roles, where generative AI and voice bots can handle large volumes of interactions. Hinton and follow‑up reports also flag software engineering, back‑office operations and some analytical roles as likely to see sharper impact by 2026 as AI takes on longer, more complex projects end‑to‑end.​

Yet the picture is not uniformly bleak. An annual outlook survey by advisory firm Teneo, cited by Business Insider and Business Today, found that 67% of CEOs expect AI to boost entry‑level hiring in 2026, and 58% plan to add senior leadership roles to steer AI initiatives. Companies are already increasing recruitment for engineering and AI‑focused positions even as they redesign or eliminate more routine roles.​

Why 2026 matters for workers

Hinton compares the current moment to the industrial revolution, which reduced the importance of human physical labour; this time, AI threatens to do the same to many forms of intellectual work. He has also warned that commercial incentives push big tech firms to prioritise labour‑replacing automation because “that’s where the big money is going to be,” heightening the risk that social protections and regulation lag behind.​

For workers and policymakers, 2026 is therefore being framed as an inflection point: either societies invest aggressively in reskilling, safety nets and human‑centric AI strategies, or they drift into the kind of jobless boom Hinton fears, where growth continues but secure work does not.