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Nearly Three-Quarters of Adults in US Believe AI Will Eliminate More Jobs Than It Will Create -- and They Want Companies To Pay For the Retraining (gallup.com)
Key findings from a Gallup poll: Nearly three-quarters of adults (73%) say an increased use of AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates (PDF). Results are consistent across most demographic groups. However, those with blue-collar jobs are particularly pessimistic, with 82% saying the transition will result in a net job loss, compared with 71% of those with white-collar jobs.
Nearly half of Americans (49%) say "soft" skills, such as teamwork, communication, creativity and critical thinking, are the most important for U.S. workers to cultivate to avoid losing their jobs to AI. Alternatively, 51% say learning "hard" skills, including math, science, coding and the ability to work with data, are the most important to maintain a job in the face of new technology adoption.
When asked to choose among seven options concerning who should pay for retraining, a clear majority of U.S. adults overall (61%) say employers should fund these programs. The federal government comes in second at 50%.
Nearly half of Americans (49%) say "soft" skills, such as teamwork, communication, creativity and critical thinking, are the most important for U.S. workers to cultivate to avoid losing their jobs to AI. Alternatively, 51% say learning "hard" skills, including math, science, coding and the ability to work with data, are the most important to maintain a job in the face of new technology adoption.
When asked to choose among seven options concerning who should pay for retraining, a clear majority of U.S. adults overall (61%) say employers should fund these programs. The federal government comes in second at 50%.
>Nearly Three-Quarters of Adults in US Believe AI Will Eliminate More Jobs Than It Will Create
In the short term, we're in for epic disaster levels of unemployment. Only the owners of capital will be immune to the worst effects.
Of course, in the long term the economy will adjust and we'll use our extra productivity to sell each other goods and services we previously wouldn't have bothered with... only this new economy will be totally disconnected from the 'real' economy where land (with sunlight, water, minerals, and space to live) will be a source of wealth and power worth more than all crap all the average people will be producing.
The gap between the rich and the poor will grow to immeasurable proportions.
Kill student loans and them people can self pay as college costs will go way down when student loans that can't be discharged go a way.
1. Change the clutch on my car.
Autonomous vehicles will be maintained by the corporation due to liability. You will not own a car in the future, you will use one. Car ownership will become extinct.
2. Fix my home's AC.
As with many electronics, we likely won't do much repairing in the future. They will be sealed units that when they go bad, you will merely replace them. That's also assuming you will own property. Robotics could probably be trained to do repairs anyway.
3. Trim my trees.
Tree-trimming drones using cloud-based AI that customers will be able to request any shape they want. Prepare for bushes trimmed to look like the poop emoji, with robotic precision. Humans will eventually be replaced.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
Investments? What investments? Your UBI payments will be nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. Good luck finding "extra" money with that. The concept of ownership is dying off. As more streaming services pop up, we are already migrating more and more to cloud-based solutions and subscription models you rent access to. This concept will continue to infect a lot of other areas in our lives.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
A human brain will be no match for big data searched and analyzed by AI doctors. In the future, you'll swallow a pill or get blood drawn from a machine that will be able to diagnose your condition within seconds, no human necessary.
6. Teach my kids.
Assuming you can afford to have kids, what exactly will they need to learn? The internet will be able to provide any answer to any question or problem. Yes, parenting will still be a thing for a while, but the concept of education and especially higher learning will radically change due to an utter lack of justification. What's the point of a college degree again when there is no job to employ humans? Humanities and the arts will hopefully survive and thrive, to allow humans to be creative, but other areas of education will die off.
7. Police my neighborhood.
See tree-trimming drones above. AI will have to evolve for some time, but it will likely be proven to respond quicker and make more unbiased decisions when needed. Massive surveillance will enable quick reaction times, and will likely lead to less overall crime.
8. Put out a house fire.
Fire-fighting drones equipped with instant cloud-based access to entire building blueprints armed with heat sensors will search for survivors. They will eventually out-climb, out-carry, and out-maneuver any human doing that job.
9. Rescue someone.
See fire-fighting, combined with AI doctors above.
10. Get elected and participate in government.
OK, I will admit, this is one area that we may keep humans in for a while. The bar seems to be getting lowered more and more, so dumb prone-to-error humans may serve in that capacity for some time.
AI is a tool that could help with all this, but it isn't a thing that can do all of this.
Yeah right. If there's one trait humans have shown to excel at over thousands of years, it's the ability to vastly underestimate and predict the future.
Ok... let's be blunt here. Most working age adults won't be replaced by AI. They'll be replaced by machines.
Being replaced by AI suggests that these people have to be replaced by something intelligent. That's absolute bullshit. They will be replaced by machines and robots and that's all.
Want an example?
People working in law firms
20 years ago, there were entire floors of buildings filled with people whose job it was to run around looking stuff up in law books. They would use the in-house libraries, they would go to state and city libraries. Etc... then came online legal libraries and tools like LexisNexis which made it take less time for the lawyers to simple type something into a search bar than to actually get a researcher, paralegal, junior lawyer, etc... on the phone and explain what they wanted.
10 years ago, if a senior lawyer wanted to write a document, he pawned that off on a junior lawyer and he/she would sit and write documents and make use of legal secretaries and paralegals to correct the formatting, properly submit it, etc... now that same senior lawyer simply opens a program and answers a series of questions and in 4-5 minutes produces the document they want, then signs it on the screen and submits it using automated systems to the courts.
The senior lawyer doesn't need juniors for about 95% of the shit work they used to do. They can simply pay a subscription to a company who keeps their tools up-to date.
Want more?
Filing Clerks
25 years ago, I was working at a major financial institution in Richmond, Virginia as a temp to try and make rent. My job was to sort tens of thousands of files and place them in the right filing cabinets. I employed a combination of Heap Sort and Quick Sort manually and finished a 3 month temp position in 5 days. Kinda screwed myself there. There were over 200 desks in the slave labor area of the office for secretaries and filing clerks. Today, I'd imagine that there are 20 desks for those same roles.
Stock "Boys"
Grocery stores used to employ dozens of these. First we cut the overhead in half by employing software which would tell the shelf stockers which items to remove from the shelves and they didn't have to manually read all the dates on the packages. Then we started sorting products better using simple filing systems on computers and multi-sized containers that could be more easily managed by machines. Then, we started replacing the tags on the shelves with small screens that could be updated by a computer to reflect changes to prices and labels. Now a grocery store 5 times the size can operate on 1/4 the staff.
Cashiers
This is 2018, most people have visited stores with self-service checkouts and a maybe a security guard. The next phase is to make employ RFID more heavily and allow shoppers to stand on a yellow box where they will be scanned and then answer on their phone whether they would like to complete the transaction where they can simply click yes. This means malls which hold 500-1000 employees across may stores can offer a service with 20-50 employees who simply visit store by store and keeping things clean... like sorting and replacing throwback bins and such. In fact, shoppers could walk the entire mall store to store and settle their charges for all their items before exiting the building.
Agriculture
In my life, I've watched farms become over 100 times larger than when I was a kid. It used to take far more people to handle the farming. But with milking machines, automated butchering systems, livestock management systems, mega tractors that can not only plant and cut, but also bundle... we haven't even started here yet. It might be that a single building full of farmers will be able to manage the entire state of Montana's farming requirements.
AI will be for people like drivers who will be removed from the eco-system. Initially, truck drivers will be cut back substantially through semi-autonomous trains of vehicles. So, a single driver in a lead truc