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Only 13 Percent of Americans Are Scared Robots Will Take Their Jobs, Gallup Poll Shows (cnbc.com)
According to the results of a Gallup poll released mid-August, most employed U.S. adults aren't too worried about technology eliminating their jobs. Only 13 percent of Americans are fearful that tech will eradicate their work opportunities in the near future, according to the poll. Workers are relatively more concerned about immediate issues like wages and benefits. CNBC reports: This corresponds with another recent Gallup survey finding that about one in eight workers, or 13 percent of Americans, also believe it's likely they will lose their jobs due to new technology, automation, robots or AI in the next five years. While the survey reflects a generally confident American workforce, Monster career expert Vicki Salemi tells CNBC Make It that people should not become complacent.
"Employees need to think of themselves as replaceable in a way that propels them into action," Salemi says, "so they can focus on continuously learning and sharpening their skills." In the meantime, Americans can look to what the tech giants are saying. On the contrary, Salemi emphasizes that Americans shouldn't be paranoid and lose sleep every night. Rather, they should think about AI "from a place of power." "If your job does start to get automated, you'll already have a game plan and solid skill set to back you up for your next career move," she says. If you find yourself in the 13 percent of Americans worried about losing their jobs to robots, Salemi says you can "robot-proof" your job through networking. "Always be on top of your game, she says. "If your industry is becoming more digitally focused, get schooled on specific skills. Instead of being lax about your career, always stay ahead of the curve, keep your resume in circulation, ask yourself where the industry is headed and most importantly where you and your skills fit in."
"Employees need to think of themselves as replaceable in a way that propels them into action," Salemi says, "so they can focus on continuously learning and sharpening their skills." In the meantime, Americans can look to what the tech giants are saying. On the contrary, Salemi emphasizes that Americans shouldn't be paranoid and lose sleep every night. Rather, they should think about AI "from a place of power." "If your job does start to get automated, you'll already have a game plan and solid skill set to back you up for your next career move," she says. If you find yourself in the 13 percent of Americans worried about losing their jobs to robots, Salemi says you can "robot-proof" your job through networking. "Always be on top of your game, she says. "If your industry is becoming more digitally focused, get schooled on specific skills. Instead of being lax about your career, always stay ahead of the curve, keep your resume in circulation, ask yourself where the industry is headed and most importantly where you and your skills fit in."
the headline in 2027 reads, only 13% of Americans have jobs after robots took over.
Silence is a state of mime.
1. People with landlines who answer polls are mostly old retired people who don't have to worry about job loss.
2. Only thirteen percent of Americans live in Fear. They probably watch some TV channel that starts with F.
3. 87 percent of Americans are blissfully unaware that robots are going to take their jobs.
Pick two.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
From the summary: ""Employees need to think of themselves as replaceable in a way that propels them into action," Salemi says, "so they can focus on continuously learning and sharpening their skills."
Learning what? Sharpening their skills for what job? My problem with people saying we should stick with the age-old advice of training for the next better job, is that they don't see that most people won't be able to get a better job. The Industrial Revolution mechanized farm work and sent farmers to factories. Improvements in manufacturing sent factory workers to clerical jobs. Office automation via IT and software killed large-scale clerical work and sent those workers to the service industry. Automation of the service industry sends these workers...nowhere. Automation of intelligence (for example, law school grads being replaced by an algorithm) sends them...nowhere, with lots of debt.
Basically, we've come to the end of the line for the next-best-job fix. For the vast majority of people incapable of handling anything beyond a simple job, this will mean they'll be unemployed and unable to get new work at reasonable pay. And it's not just factory workers and drivers...large corporations routinely pay employees fairly decent salaries to manually execute an unchanging algorithm on a stack of work. We're either going to have to make work for people or realize that not everyone can be employed...and hopefully not resort to drastic measures to fix it.
"Employees need to think of themselves as expendable in a way that propels them to accept whatever the over-classes wish for them."
Have jobs so shitty, even robots don't want to do them.
The day an AI can do all the bullshit paperwork I have to deal with, is the day I gladly let an AI take my job.
I'll go weave baskets or something for a living, at that point.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
I think the problem isn't so much a robot taking a carpentry job. Rather, robots are going to chase hobby carpenters out of their higher paying and more steady office jobs thus causing them to fall back on carpentry, thus giving you ten times more competition and putting the wage through the floor.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
86% of Americans are either not paying attention or not very bright. Ok, 85% (somebody's got to oil the robots).
Jokes aside the problem with robotic automation is that it'll chip away at the job market. It's not that your job's going away, it's your buddies. And now you're buddy is gunning for your job. For less pay. A lot less pay.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
As long as your savings are invested, you shouldn't have to worry about inflation. Your investments should keep up with inflation.
I don't respond to AC's.
I can imagine robots doing most of crown molding. First, a device laser-measures the walls and ceiling. Then the measurements are sent out to a factory, where robots custom-build the molding parts. Finally I can imagine a robot placing and nailing the parts. But even if a robot doesn't finish the job, a robot in a factory could mean one person does twice as many jobs.
And a Roomba could almost be converted for sanding floors, but it's not quite strong enough or even enough.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Go to the bank and withdraw as much of that now worthless paper as possible... Because even when you canâ(TM)t buy anything with it, paper still has marginal nutritional value... And with as much drug residue is on circulated currency, youâ(TM)d cease to care after a couple thousand dollars of paper lettuce.
Thirty four characters live here.
Joke: I talked with a very old horse who said steam engines took his job.
True story: When paint rollers were introduced, painters protested.
That's simply how many folks are worried about it. There's nothing stating that people are thinking intelligently about the subject.
#DeleteChrome
Paper does have a marginal nutritional value, as well as being high in fiber!
US currency however is printed on a type of linen cloth and the ink is highly toxic.
What will you do when universal basic income causes hyperinflation
Do you mean the way that trillions in QE caused the 0% hyperinflation we have today?
Gains in productivity cause deflation. For price stability, we need monetary expansion to offset that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
#DeleteFacebook
Welcome to the 2020s, where having a job is a job.
It always goes like this. Whatever the Chicken Littles of the world are screaming about don't exactly come to pass, but something else changes, and not for the better.
The sordid underbelly of stagnant wages? Now you're working even harder in the margins to maintain your claim on the same dollar. This is yet another form of outsourcing to the employee, and I bet you can't even claim your office space at home devoted to all this "job upkeep" as a valid tax write-off.
Yet you are now 20% revenue-zero independent contractor, just to keep your day job in good standing.
Ask him what he is going to do about robots stealing our jobs, and call on him to outlaw robots.
Slashdot had this story a couple days ago with the new robots that can reliably sew T-shirts and have started selling the production lines for that. I expect this will kick off a wave of production consolidation in the garment industry. I expect some of it will result in factories being built in the US. Those factories will employ a handful of people to produce what had previously taken hundreds or thousands of people.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
What proportion of the US are professional medical test subjects, blood donors, non-robot porn stars etc?
Requiem for the American Dream
Gallup had to abuse statistics to come up with that conclusion. That, and they falsely assume that the worker us defective - versus those implementing AI/ML.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
I think you're not getting parent's point. In economic terms wealth!=amount of cash one has, parent meant "richer" in "Consumer welfare" context (try google it). The purchasers now have $5 less per person in cash but they more enjoy more individual benefits derived from the consumption of the app. On related note, if you bought $2 of buns for breakfast, you most likely benefited much more from buying the $2 buns than growing the wheat, grinding it to flour and baking it yourself. That's how economy and division of labour is supposed to work, and money is just a medium of exchange and not wealth.
I'll be dead and long gone before bicycle mechanics are replaced by robots
The economy wrt AI is indistinguishable from a fixed pie, as destruction exceeds replacement - especially for displaced persons.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
That's presuming a replacement will arrive in time for and will accept the displaced. So far, AI/ML has proven otherwise.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Only 13 percent of Americans are fearful that tech will eradicate their work opportunities in the near future
And the other 87% are in denial.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
There are currently about 155 million Americans working out of 326 million Americans or about 47.5%. The survey claims one in eight "workers" fear robots may take their jobs and then goes on to say 13% of "Americans". I guess that you're not American if you're not in the 47.5% that work. They could at least say "American workers". It matters.
Note that American total output and total employment are both at record levels. The dissatisfaction that people feel can be entirely attributed to the reduction in Americans working in manufacturing from over 20% to under 10% which, given that manufacturing output is also at its record levels, can be entirely attributed to efficiency increases that are mostly attributable to automation of one type or another.
This is not something that could happen. It is not theoretical. It is something that is already happening. The increases in these core middle class jobs have not kept up with the losses from automation since the '70s. It is the core fact behind the divergence in incomes.
I'd go with: 13% of US citizens are thin foil hat nutjobs. When job automation reduces the job market the salaries will be pushed down, which will reduce the investment on job automation and push the unemployalipse further away.
Also, the biggest field currently being targeted by automation are drivers, and autonomous cars won't be a thing for the next 10 to 20 years. And all existing transport floats won't be phased the day after the autonomous vehicles get regulated, so there'll time for the old dogs on the field to retire.
Job automation should worry the Alpha Generation.
The robot which scans your groceries is you.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
How soon will the retirement robots be forcing us geezers out of retirement?
I didn't desert Windows; Windows deserted me: BSOD
(and 3% are Amish).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
One thing to keep in mind, no matter how much money the business owners want, they'll always want humans to talk to. If you are in the US, might I remind you to put on deodorant, shower daily, have a few small talk options available at short notice, and learn to be nice to people... it might just keep you employed when the robots take over.
Seriously though, advice from humans can be emotional... advice from AI is always cold. Business people react half rationally and half emotionally. They always need their lieutenants. And the best bosses like to chat about real life (or video game life) just as much as business... so no, I don't think robots are going to replace every job in existence.
As long as your savings are invested, you shouldn't have to worry about inflation. Your investments should keep up with inflation.
While this is true under normal circumstances, if even 1970's style inflation occurs then investments will not keep up with inflation. And that was not even close to hyperinflation. I think fears of hyperinflation are unwarranted, but if it does happen then investments in mutual funds are not going to be sufficient.
Hyperinflation is mostly a boogeyman, but it does happen. And it is catastrophic. If you look at post-WW1 Germany, post-WW2 Hungary, and Zimbabwe a decade ago, prices can double every day. A million dollars of retirement funds in 1946 Hungary would have turned into the equivalent of a few hundred bucks in a month.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Probably stupid of me to reply to an AC,... The government "losing" money via tax cuts comes from a business mindset. Lower taxes means lower "profits". This is viewed as a loss in their revenue stream. Thus there is less money to budget with. Now budgetting against an economy is a little more complex, discounts and sales can increase revenue, and tax cuts could have a similar effect on the economy, and thus overall taxes.
Before robots come, there will be a huge need of human brains and human hands to manage and put robots together in factories as they can't make robots with robots because robots are not here yet. Yacine B. - TheTechyHome.com
There *are* no safe investments. Different failure modes wipe out different strategies, and some cause previously failing modes to succeed.
One thing you need to remember is that money is governmental accounting for your worth. And all governments cheat some group. (People disagree about exactly what "cheat" means, but for every definition I'm aware of, the prior statement remains true.) Bitcoin, etc., are parasitic on a working government...without a government you won't have an enabling internet. But survivalism is a bet that things are going to fall apart, and fails if they don't.
If the government allowed the creation of additional money at the exact same rate as the production of wealth happened, then there would be no inflation...but nobody even knows how to measure "wealth". It sure isn't money. And this doesn't even address the distribution problem. When robots increasingly do the work, justify a method of distribution. (I'm not talking about when they do all the work. I'm assuming that there will still be some necessary jobs that aren't automated.)
Now to add to the complexity of the problem, most wealth is intangible, and generated by societies rather than individuals. Knowledge of how to produce a hardened steel screw from raw materials, etc. The machinery needed for each way of making that screw is also wealth, but the knowledge of how to do that is the valuable, and took centuries to develop...and part of it was the knowledge that a hardened steel screw was valuable. Without knowing that you don't even aim to produce one. What any one person can add is a very thin layer on top of an immense existing structure. There is a reason that three people in different countries tried to patent the phone at the same time. "Winner takes all." is a hideous travesty. A patent should say something like "The government won't buy or pay for this device if made by someone else.". And it should require the production of a working model. And the patent should be specific. These idiotic generic patents are even an abuse of existing law.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
And this is the reason the article survey came up with that stupid opinion. Current robots can't do your job, so you don't believe future robots will cause you any problem. But they will. Just how they'll do it is uncertain, since there are multiple ways in which it could happen. They might just become better than you at detail work, flexibility, and aesthetic judgment, but that's only one way it could happen, and probably not the fastest. More likely they'll more quickly lead to a redesign of methods of building into ways that are easy for them and hard for you. There will still be a few really rich people who will want the old style enough to pay for it and also be wealthy enough, but the number of jobs will decrease by a huge factor, and most carpenters will end up unemployed. The real robot carpenters may be a decade behind the first wave.
OTOH, predicting the timeline is tricky. It depends on lots of other things. E.g., if the robots need to carry their smarts in their body it will take longer than if they are able to run off some wireless transmission, but the wavebands are already getting jammed, so it will need to be some fairly high bandwidth short range transmission. An optic link might do it, or infra-red or even low power microwave.
People are lousy at predicting the future because the actual future is the result of LOTS of things currently under development, most of which won't go anywhere, but some of which will be more spectacularly successful than anyone expects. Maybe holographic projectors will cause us not to care what anything we can't touch really looks like. Unlikely, but it's "one of the things that are under development". I doubt that VR would be able to get THAT extreme, but it could happen...given the proper changes in social custom.
OTOH, as a rule of thumb, if a prediction is for less than five years, expect it to take longer than they say, because of unexpected problems. And if it's for longer than 15 years expect it to take less time because of unexpected solutions. And note that there's a lot of uncertainty in this. And people's predictions of when something will happen are often biased in ways that confound this rule of thumb, you've also got to consider how reasonable the prediction is, which is hard if you aren't "skilled in the art".
P.S.: You, the carpenter, probably won't immediately be able to justify buying the robot. But the contractor who hires you will be able to justify it a lot sooner. Especially if it's also a plumber.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
87% of American workers are stupid. News at 11.
Wow! You must be a hit with the ladies!
Seriously though, it wasn't great because of too many compromises Obama made going in but it was a step in the right direction. Socialized/single payer is the only solution as borne out by the evidence of other countries doing it. Yes, we need healthcare reform, insurance reform (elimination), eating/nutrition reform. We need general lifestyle changes: more sleep, better eating (less carbs, more fat), and better exercising (lift heavy weights). Change those things and everything else could be made to work.
Only I can judge you.
You undervalue your potential competition at your own peril. They are smart, determined, focused, and tougher than you think. They could have gone into carpentry but chose not to. They may be damn good at it, scary damn good.
Only I can judge you.
Actually chances are their jobs will be obsolete before robots will take over. Also if they are career minded they would get promoted and change the nature of their job by the times Robots can do what what they are currently doing in their jobs.
We have worried about automation killing jobs for the past hundred years. However the nature of the jobs have changed and these jobs that automation has taken over, has boosted productivity meaning companies need to hire more people to do jobs that the robots cannot do.
A manufacturing plant back in 1918 With a team of 100 employees can product 800 widgets a day. After automation it can product 8000 widget a day and they hire 500 employees to help meet demand. Without the automation the company and industry couldn't meet demand or sell at a price to match it. After automation came across there is a higher demand that can be met, thus needing more people to do the work.
The problem we have in the economy is finding jobs for workers. But finding customers for companies. High unemployment and under paid employees do not have the money to be customers. If business improve its process (even with automation) then they can sell more product and hire additional people in the areas that are expensive or difficult to automate. Often this mean a greater peak the company could do then before it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Maybe holographic projectors will cause us not to care what anything we can't touch really looks like. Unlikely, but it's "one of the things that are under development". I doubt that VR would be able to get THAT extreme, but it could happen...given the proper changes in social custom.
Its funny you should postulate that. My kids used to play Club Penguin and they really liked decorating the walls of their "house" with knick-knacks and such. Why not the same thing in 'real life'?
Only I can judge you.
" I heard a guy who have a very big and old farm here in Denmark say that in the 1800s they had more than a 150 people working on the land. Today they have 3. "
Looks to me like 147 jobs got taken by automation. By what math do you get "robots will take no jobs" from that?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
So, in 200 years, there was a net loss of 147 jobs in that farm alone. You're totally right, mechanization and automation will always cost jobs and concentrate wealth at the "top".
Only I can judge you.
Well, the reason holographic projections are unlikely to replace actual things include that they tend to wash out in bright light and that the current projectors are expensive and require a lot of maintenance. So I think them unlikely. But they *might* happen. It would probably require a combination to technical improvements and fashion changes, but those are both possibilities, and it's possible that just the right ones could happen so that....
Which is what I meant about the difficulty in predicting the future. It's easy to look at things and say "The current situation is unstable, and it could go in this direction...", but saying it *will* go in this direction is something more difficult. Saying "It's not going to stay the same" is a safe prediction, but nearly useless. So.
Consider supermarket checkout clerks. Most supermarkets I go to have lots of unused lines, and they used to be full all the time. This is partially because of bar codes speeding up the job of the clerks, and partially because of self-checkout. And perhaps it's partially that you don't get people coming in all at the same time as much, and partially home deliver of items. So even after the fact I don't really know why many of those jobs disappeared, though I can spot contributing factors, some of which one could call automation, though hardly robots. Or think of the way the cashier job at a fast-food joint has been deskilled.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Rather than holographic projectors I was thinking more along the lines of augmented reality glasses. Like if you look through your glasses you see the "bonus" stuff that only exists in the digital world. Like a limited edition copy of an original mural by Diego Rivera, only shows up through the glasses, wherever you've placed it. When friends come over, they share your insanity by logging into your augmentations... Ancient vases, fancy clothing made of rhinoceros hide, etc. All only existing in the digital world. Heck, you could make yourself much more attractive (or scary) even, digitally. Fun!
I agree, the future is hard to predict though. I definitely see the disappearance of many jobs within the next 50 years. Definitely still within my lifetime, I hope.
Only I can judge you.
No. The existing ones have to be counted as rudimentary as well as washing out on bright light and needing lot of maintenance. They are lab curiosities. But they *may* not stay that way. I was mentioning them as an example of something that probably won't be significant...but which *MIGHT* be if some unexpected things happen (which would need to include *both* technical improvement as fad).
Just remember that at one time the estimate was there might be a market for 6 computers in the whole world. Now granted, that estimate was made awhile ago... (1943.) It took a large number of technical changes to get from then to now, but it also took a bunch of social changes.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I think VR glasses will be *MUCH* more likely, and therefore not as good an example of what I meant. Also, they'd have a very different use case.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You mean something more like the danger room or that fancy room in star trek that can be anything... Yeah, that'll take a while.
Only I can judge you.
https://www.google.com/search?...
I didn't see any refs there to the Japanese pop-singer who's a computer generated hologram, but it's also real.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
IIUC, sometimes the Japanese singer is projected onto a fog, but you're going to need SOME secondary radiator or you won't see the light. The only other way is to shine the light directly at you, and with a laser that's not exactly recommended. And using a secondary radiator doesn't mean that the original projection wasn't a hologram. (Was it? Possibly not technically. But words generally have a loose meaning as well as a tight meaning, and I wasn't talking about the mathematical definition, which nothing existing really quite fits.)
Well, ok, there's another approach, though you might not want to call that a hologram either: What you do is compute what light would be emitted at each point intersecting with a surface and then have a REALLY LARGE computer screen generate that light. You need to have LOTS of (very short) light pipes inside the screen, because each point needs to generate different lights headed in different directions. With this system each watcher needs to be tracked so you can generate the image that they should see. VR glasses are a better way to accomplish this.
Since what I was originally discussing was fake 3-D images of a finely grained ceiling, the fancy ways and precise definitions seem unreasonable. A fake moose head over the fireplace doesn't need to be precisely tuned, especially if the room is so designed that nobody can get within 3 feet of it. A wood paneled ceiling is even easier...and still beyond reasonable availability. (Remember, was I was asserting is that robot installed ceilings would get there first.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, there *is* another approach that has been used, but I don't know on what scale. What you do it take a crystal (probably some kind of glass) and position certain tiny "fluorescent" "drops" carefully within it. These drops only fluoresce if stimulated appropriately. This is done by hitting them with two appropriately chosen laser frequencies from two different directions. Only where the beams intersect is there a visible light emission. You've got to scan rapidly. The tricky part is building the "crystal ball".
This dates back at least to the 90's. They were talking about using it as a model for a diamond memory. I haven't heard about it since then. (I've heard about the diamond memory, but not the 3-D model.) My guess is that it's still technically too difficult (which partially means other ways are easier).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.