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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."

32 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. In other news.. by wbr1 · · Score: 4, Funny

    the headline in 2027 reads, only 13% of Americans have jobs after robots took over.

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
    1. Re:In other news.. by MangoCats · · Score: 2

      Somewhere in the 1990s (really really late in the 1990s) only 13% of Americans surveyed thought the Internet would be anything of interest to them.

  2. Three possibilities by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
    1. Re:Three possibilities by DidgetMaster · · Score: 2, Informative

      The people who really fear stuff like this are the progressives who are convinced that wealth is not something that is created but just fought over. To them the pie is always the same size and if someone gets a bigger piece, that means someone else got a smaller piece. Robots will not create any wealth. They will just take it from real people, right?

      If I make $10, that means that somebody else didn't get it. Maybe I was one of those one-percenters who was privileged and did not earn or deserve it. It can't possibly be that I did something to create that money out of thin air and by also spending it, give other people the chance to build wealth too. Everyone knows that wealth does not 'trickle down', right?

    2. Re:Three possibilities by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Wow. You really don't get what conservatives are. Conservatives always believe in a fixed pie, and getting a larger slice.

      Everyone else just makes more pies. And brownies.

      Because sometimes you don't want pie.

      It's called capitalism. You may have missed it. Check out Adam Smith's seven books (not just one or two, seven).

      --
      -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
    3. Re:Three possibilities by ErichTheRed · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The problem with this argument is that wealth isn't created. It's like energy conservation -- it's a fixed supply of money that just keeps getting shifted around. If I pay someone $10, I have $10 less and they have $10 more, but the only way wealth can be created or destroyed is by changing the money supply. In previous generations in the US, this fixed-size pie was more evenly divided for a few reasons;
      - High corporate taxes meant that companies avoided them by paying workers more and giving them more generous benefits, because there was a point where it made more sense to distribute the next dollar as an expense rather than declare it as profit.
      - Workers had more rights and a greater voice in their salaries and working conditions. Now it's a race to the bottom, which is going to go into warp speed as people claw and kill each other for the last available jobs at any wage.
      - There were fewer ways for high net worth individuals and companies to hide their income. Now, there are way more tax loopholes and offshore tax havens to park profits and keep them from being taxed or used domestically.
      - In general, wealth is being hoarded. Rich people buy the occasional yacht or mansion, but these purchases don't add up to the same effect as employing a bunch of people in a business.
      - Globalization means that businesses can just pick the cheapest country this year and offshore all their operations for a fraction of what they would pay workers in their home country, further accelerating the race to the bottom.

      Short of increasing or decreasing the money supply by manipulating interest rates or buying/selling debt, how do you create wealth? It's definitely a fixed pie.

    4. Re:Three possibilities by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem with this argument is that wealth isn't created. It's like energy conservation

      If that were true, we would all still be in the stone age.

      If I pay someone $10, I have $10 less and they have $10 more, but the only way wealth can be created or destroyed is by changing the money supply.

      Nonsense. This would only be true if things were worth the same to everyone. If someone pays $5 for my app, I am $5 richer since that app had a marginal value of $0 to me (I can make as many copies as I want). The buyer is also richer, since that app is worth more than $5 to him, or he wouldn't have bought it.

    5. Re:Three possibilities by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

      The people who really fear stuff like this are the progressives who are convinced that wealth is not something that is created but just fought over. To them the pie is always the same size and if someone gets a bigger piece, that means someone else got a smaller piece. Robots will not create any wealth. They will just take it from real people, right?

      But let's just imagine your world, where everyone is aggressivly pursuing wealth. Will everyone be wealthy? The aggressive accumulation of wealth means that you want to have more wealth than others. If everyone is wealthy, everyone is also poor.

      Everyone knows that wealth does not 'trickle down', right?

      Wealth is an equation. There needs to be production and consumption. The rich and the poor will naturally settle into their respective camps. But when one group has dominion over the other, unbalance results. And no, trickle down doesn't work. I amassed a bit of lucre by investments and staying out of debt. And now, whenever I get more, I do the same with it. The only way it could be said that my wealth creates jobs is by stuff I buy. Which except for an extra vacation or two, is the same as when I didn't have much money. The idea that I am a job creator is pretty funny.

      Your idea equates to the cocept that if one person has all of the money, they will rain down prosperity uopn all of the rest of us, who by the same token have nothing.

      And by the way, many of those who have a lot of money will come after other people's money, so the 1 percent will eat each other eventually. Remember, greed is good.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    6. Re: Three possibilities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Such changes can happen suddenly.

      It is impossible until it isn't. Then it becomes possible very quickly.

      The types of learning AI we're seeing being deployed now would at the very minimum reduce the number of blue collar workers it would take to do the same job. "Manage by exception rather than the rule." As a result, many jobs could potentially be outsourced or offloaded to AI vendors, requiring a handful of people to oversee the machines.

      Just because you can't envision blue collar jobs being done by machines, doesn't mean somebody else can't figure out how to automate a portion when a new piece of technology becomes available to solve or reduce the cost of another critical part. 80% to 90% of your job can be automated.

      Our economy has been moving towards more efficient and lower cost production, with the intent of removing costly First World workers from the equation.

    7. Re: Three possibilities by Monster_user · · Score: 2

      Logged in finally... Doesn't have to be fully automated, it just has to flag somebody who isn't driving or riding in the truck, and provide them enough information to handle the situation. Make it so one former driver can manage more than one truck without a body inside it. It isn't about removing the human element entirely, just reducing the number of humans required to do the job, by eliminating the parts of the job a well trained monkey can do.

    8. Re: Three possibilities by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 2
      Capitalism favors a top heavy distribution

      A major component of "capitalism" (how would you define capitalism?) is that people can use the wealth (capital) they have, to generate more capital. This is called positive feedback which inherently leads to exponential runaway unless restrained by something (called regulation).

      A system with positive feedback will grow and grown until it explodes (think amplifier howl). In social terms the result is the French (or Russian) Revolution, or ISIS.

      In Europe, we have socialists and social security providing restraint so we get there slower.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    9. Re:Three possibilities by genfail · · Score: 2

      Maybe you should read all seven of his books since Adam Smith was anti-capitalist.

  3. Wonder how they'll feel when it happens by ErichTheRed · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens by waspleg · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If I had mod points they'd be yours.

      The goal of all of this shit should be to eliminate as much work as possible for the good of everyone but our economic system will not allow for that.

      Our technological evolution has far outpaced our societal evolution and I mean globally not just America.

    2. Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens by Gr8Apes · · Score: 2

      Automation of the service industry sends these workers...

      To YouTube.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    3. Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens by dunkelfalke · · Score: 3

      People were thinking the exact same thing at the time. If there are no farm jobs, then where will people work? Nobody thought factory labor was going to be big.

      And yet there was a generation of farmers without work who weren't accepted as workers in the factories, dying in debtor' prisons.

      People were thinking the exact same thing at the time. If there are no factory jobs, then where will people work? Nobody thought office labor was going to be big.

      And yet many workers still had to work in increasingly worse conditions because there was not enough clerical work to do and it also required many skills former workers simply did not have. Socialists didn't just come out of nowhere, you know.

      People were thinking the exact same thing at the time. If there are no service industry jobs, then where will people work? Nobody thought the service industry sector was going to be big.

      Also resulting in high rates of permanently unemployed. Literally millions are out of work and are not able to find a job for years.

      And here we are today.

      Here we are indeed. Only you seem to look at everything through rose-tinted glasses.

      --
      "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
    4. Re:Wonder how they'll feel when it happens by Headw1nd · · Score: 2

      The problem is not just that we don't have a society-wide system that allows for this, we don't even have a small scale system that works under these principles that we can model society after. Off the top of my head, the only "work-optional" systems I can think of are college undergrads and hereditary aristocracy, neither of which shows much promise as a good model for our social system moving forward.

  4. CLARIFICATION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    "Employees need to think of themselves as expendable in a way that propels them to accept whatever the over-classes wish for them."

  5. The other 87% by bobstreo · · Score: 3, Funny

    Have jobs so shitty, even robots don't want to do them.

  6. Re:Yeah, not too worried by fluffernutter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  7. In other news by rsilvergun · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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/
  8. Re: Yeah, not too worried by Ken_g6 · · Score: 2

    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)
  9. Re: Meh, I'm just going to coast on out by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. the tread mill tread mill by epine · · Score: 2

    "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."

    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.

  11. I am guessing these people didn't hear..... by Elfich47 · · Score: 2

    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.
  12. Re:not quite as simple as you think by hai_Priesty · · Score: 2

    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.

  13. Except that youre wrong. by edgedmurasame · · Score: 2

    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.
  14. They're coming for us. by wkwilley2 · · Score: 2

    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?
  15. Journalists should not do math by RhettLivingston · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  16. Not Surprising by xvan · · Score: 2

    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.

  17. In capatalist America... by BeCre8iv · · Score: 2

    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
  18. Robots don't make good office buddies by omfglearntoplay · · Score: 2

    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.