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The “Godfather of AI” says that some fields are safer than others when it comes to being replaced by AI.

Geoffrey Hinton, 78, is often referred to as the Godfather of AI due to his pioneering work on neural networks, which began in the late 1970s. He won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on machine learning and is currently a professor emeritus in computer science at the University of Toronto.

In a recent interview on the podcast “Diary of a CEO” that aired on Monday, Hinton said AI has the potential to cause mass joblessness.

“I think for mundane intellectual labor, AI is just going to replace everybody,” Hinton said. “Mundane intellectual labor” refers to white-collar jobs. He specified that the replacement would take the form of “a person and an AI assistant” doing the work that “ten people did previously.”

Hinton gave one example, noting that paralegals were at risk of losing their jobs to AI, and said that he would be “terrified” to work in a call center right now, due to the potential for automation. However, he pointed out that blue-collar work would take a longer time to be replaced by AI.

“I’d say it’s going to be a long time before it [AI] is as good at physical manipulation,” Hinton said in the podcast. “So, a good bet would be to be a plumber.”

In the interview, Hinton also challenged the notion that AI would create new jobs, stating that if AI automated intellectual tasks, there would be few jobs left for people to do.

“You’d have to be very skilled to have a job that it [AI] just couldn’t do,” Hinton said.

AI has the potential to decrease hiring, especially for entry-level jobs. A report released last month from venture capital firm SignalFire found that big tech companies have stopped hiring new graduates for entry-level roles as much as they did in the past, and AI is a significant reason for the decline.

The report found that the percentage of new graduate hires at companies like Meta and Google dropped by 25% from 2023 to 2024, reaching just 7% in 2024.

It’s not just the tech industry — Wall Street also shows signs of being impacted by AI. In March, Morgan Stanley announced layoffs of 2,000 employees, intending to replace some with AI. A report released in January from Bloomberg Intelligence showed that AI could cause as many as 200,000 job cuts across 93 major banks, including Citigroup and JPMorgan, within the next five years.

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Geoffrey Hinton. Photo By Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile for Collision via Getty Images

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Astrophysics is, as many astrophysicists will tell you, the story of everything. The nature and evolution of stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, dark matter, and dark energy—and our attempts to understand these things—allow us to pose the ultimate questions and reach for the ultimate answers. But the practitioners of these arts, as the late astronomer Vera Rubin wrote in her autobiography’s preface, “too seldom stress the enormity of our ignorance.”

“No one promised that we would live in the era that would unravel the mysteries of the cosmos,” Rubin wrote. And yet a new observatory named for her, opening its eyes soon, will get us closer than ever before to unraveling some of them. This will be possible because the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will do something revolutionary, rare, and relatively old-fashioned: it will just look out at the universe and see what there is to see.

Perched on a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes, the telescope is fully assembled and operating, although scientists are not able to use it just yet. A few weeks of testing remain to ensure that its camera—the largest in astronomical history, with a more than 1.5-meter lens—is working as it should. Engineers are monitoring how Earth’s gravity causes the telescope’s three huge glass mirrors to sag and how this slight slumping will affect the collection and measurement of individual photons, including those that have traveled for billions of light-years to reach us. They are also monitoring how the 350-metric-ton telescope will rapidly pan across seven full moons’ worth of sky, stabilize and go completely still, and take two 15-second exposures before doing it all over again all night long.

In this fashion, the scope plans to canvas the entire sky visible from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere every three nights, remaking an all-sky map over and over again and noticing how it changes. And computer scientists are finalizing plans for how to sift through 20 terabytes of data every night, which is 350 times more than the data collected by the vaunted James Webb Space Telescope each day. Others are making sure interesting objects or sudden cosmic surprises aren’t missed among Rubin Observatory’s constant stream of images. Software will search for differences between each map and send out an alert about each one; there could be as many as 10 million alerts a night about potential new objects or changes in the maps.

From finding Earth-grazing asteroids and tiny failed stars called brown dwarfs to studying the strangely smooth rotation of entire galaxies sculpted by dark matter, the Rubin Observatory’s mission will encompass the entire spectrum of visible-light astronomy. The telescope will continue mapping the sky for 10 years. It may be better poised to answer astrophysicists’ deepest questions than any observatory built to date.

“The potential for discovery is immense,” said Christian Aganze, a galactic archaeologist at Stanford University, who will use the observatory’s data to study the history of the Milky Way.

The Rubin Observatory’s Mission

The observatory’s goal was not always so broad. Originally named the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), the Rubin Observatory was initially proposed as a dark-matter hunter. Vera Rubin found the first hard evidence for what we now call dark matter, a gargantuan amount of invisible material that shapes the universe and the way galaxies move through it. She and her colleague, the late astronomer Kent Ford, were studying the dynamics of galaxies when they made the discovery in the 1970s.

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A doctor in Florida has used a robot to remotely perform surgery on a cancer patient thousands of miles away in Africa.

Vipul Patel, the medical director of the Global Robotic Institute at Orlando’s Advent Health, recently performed a prostatectomy, which removes part or all of the prostate, on Fernando da Silva of Angola, ABC News reported in an exclusive story from medical correspondent Dr. Darien Sutton on Tuesday.

Da Silva, 67, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in March, and in June, Patel cut out the cancer using transcontinental robotic telesurgery. The surgery was a success, according to ABC News.

Prostate cancer is very prevalent in Africa, Patel told the network, adding, “In the past, they really haven’t monitored it well or they haven’t had treatments.”

“We’ve been working on this really for two years,” Patel said. “We traveled the globe, looking at the right technologies.”

Da Silva was the first patient in a human clinical trial approved by the Food and Drug Administration to test this technology.

Surgeons have used a multimillion-dollar robot to operate on patients using “enhanced visuals and nimble controls” before, ABC News reported, but they are often near their patients when operating the machine.

Patel used fiber optic cables to test the technology at a long distance from his patient. “There was no perceptible delay in my brain,” the doctor said.

His surgical team was in the operating room with Da Silva just in case they had to jump in.

“We made sure we had plan A, B, C, and D. I always have my team where the patient is,” the doctor said.

In case something went awry with the telecommunications, “the team would just take over and finish the case and do it safely,” he said.

Reflecting on the surgery, Patel called it “a small step for a surgeon, but it was huge leap for health care.”

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Dr. Vipul Patel in Florida used a robot to remotely perform surgery on a cancer patient thousands of miles away in Africa

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Subatomic particles such as quarks can pair up when linked by ‘strings’ of force fields — and release energy when the strings are pulled to the point of breaking. Two teams of physicists have now used quantum computers to mimic this phenomenon and watch it unfold in real time.

The results, described in two Nature papers on June 4, are the latest in a series of breakthroughs towards using quantum computers for simulations that are beyond the ability of any ordinary computers.

“String breaking is a very important process that is not yet fully understood from first principles,” says Christian Bauer, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California. Physicists can calculate the final results of particle collisions that form or break strings using classical computers, but cannot fully simulate what happens in between. The success of the quantum simulations is “incredibly encouraging,” Bauer says.

String simulations

Each experiment was conducted by an international collaboration involving academic and industry researchers — one team at QuEra Computing, a start-up company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another at the Google Quantum AI Lab in Santa Barbara, California.

The researchers using QuEra’s Aquila machine encoded information in atoms that were arranged in a 2D honeycomb pattern, each suspended in place by an optical ‘tweezer’. The quantum state of each atom — a qubit that could be excited or relaxed — represented the electric field at a point in space, explains co-author Daniel González-Cuadra, a theoretical physicist now at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid. In the other experiment, researchers encoded the 2D quantum field in the states of superconducting loops on Google’s Sycamore chip.

The teams used diametrically opposite quantum-simulation philosophies. The atoms in Aquila were arranged so that the electrostatic forces between them mimicked the behaviour of the electric field, and continuously evolved towards their own states of lower energy — an approach called analogue quantum simulation. The Google machine was instead used as a ‘digital’ quantum simulator: the superconducting loops were made to follow the evolution of the quantum field ‘by hand’, through a discrete sequence of manipulations.

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The man suspected of opening fire on two Minnesota legislators and their spouses on 14 June, killing one legislator and her husband, was apprehended late on Sunday night and charged with two counts of murder and two of attempted murder, the state’s governor, Tim Walz, said at a news conference.

Vance Boelter, 57, is suspected of fatally shooting the Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, at their residence early on Saturday. Boelter is also suspected of shooting the state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their home, seriously injuring them.

“One man’s unthinkable actions have altered the state of Minnesota,” the state’s governor, Tim Walz, said at a news conference.

Boelter was arrested in a rural area in Sibley County, southwest of Minneapolis, according to police, who added that he was armed when he was taken into custody.

A criminal complaint unsealed Sunday night said Boelter faces two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted second-degree murder in the deaths of the Hortmans and the wounding of Hoffman and his wife.

Authorities alleged Boelter fled on foot after police responded to a shooting at Hortman’s house. Authorities alleged Boelter was wearing a police uniform that so closely resembled an actual law enforcement uniform that most civilians wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Earlier Sunday, Drew Evans, superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said at a news conference a nationwide warrant had been issued for the suspect’s arrest.

Evans said authorities found a car very early Sunday, they believed Boelter was using, a few miles from his home in Green Isle, in the farm country about an hour west of Minneapolis. He also said they found evidence in the car that was relevant to the investigation, but did not provide details.

The superintendent also said authorities interviewed Boelter’s wife and other family members in connection with Saturday’s shootings. He said they were cooperative and were not in custody.

The FBI had issued a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to his arrest and conviction. They circulated a photo taken Saturday of Boelter wearing a tan cowboy hat and asked the public to report sightings.

On Sunday evening, US Senator Amy Klobuchar shared a statement from Yvette Hoffman expressing appreciation for the outpouring of public support.

“John is enduring many surgeries right now and is closer every hour to being out of the woods,” Yvette Hoffman said in a text that Klobuchar posted on social media. “He took 9 bullet hits. I took 8, and we are both incredibly lucky to be alive. We are gutted and devastated by the loss of Melissa and Mark.”

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Officials in Minnesota announce shooting suspect is in custody

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