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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%.
I mean, I don't know that average Joe necessarily has terribly good insight on this subject (and survey results are easy to manipulate by finding a wording that leads responses) - but the different figures in the summary are very different, and suggest very different political outcomes here.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
>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.
I think it's amazing that more people think hard skills (i.e., things computers are good at) are essential rather than soft skills (i.e., things computers aren't good at) are necessary for humans.
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
I have a hard time seeing AI being a job creator. Once you get past a certain threshold of ability you can replace large swathes of jobs with AI and the only thing that gets added is the manufacturing of the automated systems, which can be automated itself, and programming AIs, which is highly specialized and will have limited numbers needed anyway.
the bad news is 1/4 haven't. When the industrial rev took off it put more folks out of work than it employed. That's where Luddites came from. The were freaking out over losing their livelihoods in a society where your quality of life is determiined by your job.
It took 80 years for other tech to catch up and employee more people than it put out of work. The people alive during those 80 years either lived like kings or like crap. And as far as I can tell nothing's changed. Your quality of life is determined by your job (or lack thereof)
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1. Change the clutch on my car.
2. Fix my home's AC.
3. Trim my trees.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
6. Teach my kids.
7. Police my neighborhood.
8. Put out a house fire.
9. Rescue someone.
10. Get elected and participate in government.
AI is a tool that could help with all this, but it isn't a thing that can do all of this.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Is retraining people a realistic solution? How does a "retrained" worker compete with someone who has kept their skills up and has been involved with the technology for several decades, or even their entire life?
Our public schools are graduating students with little to no job skills, what makes us think this will change? How can these people _be_ trained for these jobs?
We already have a number of people who have difficulty living in modern society. As life becomes more demanding, requiring more education and knowledge, what do we do with them?
As long as i get to be the sex toy.
we need to start taxing companies who use AI/robots that take away jobs
Exactly. We need to start by taxing everyone that uses a washing machine or dishwasher rather than employing a laundress and scullery maid.
I think if you delved deeper into this you'd find that the same people who are screaming "THE SKY IS FALLING!" also don't understand that so-called 'AI' is not what television, movies, and the media all portray it to be: I'm convinced they think it's walking, talking, thinking, human-like; sentient and self-aware. The reality couldn't hardly be farther from the truth. These 'robots' they're all worried about are very limited, and really can't be trusted. Even the programmers who wrote them can only make educated guesses as to what's going on under the hood. People need to know that these so-called 'AIs' will need to be closely monitored since their output will not necessarily be what you expect, and in many cases leaving them unsupervised may create dangerous situations for humans in the vicinity otherwise.
Management types are part of this problem too. They're not any smarter when it comes to the reality of these so-called 'artificial intelligences', and as a result their expectations are way out of whack from reality, too. Then there's marketing people, and do I really need to explain how far they'll go to make a sale?
Everyone needs to calm down. There also needs to be some realistic, fact-based conversation amongst everyone as to what these so-called 'AIs' are and are not, and what they are and are not capable of, and most important of all: they are not equivalent to (or better than!) a human being in any way, shape, or form and will not be anytime in the forseeable future.
Without time or money, it's difficult to do it yourself.
More importantly, Who is to say the automation is even coming from the same employer? If you make existing employers re-train everyone they lay off then you almost guarantee that new automation will come from new start ups that replace the existing employers.
At some point, people and society will need to realize that a deep change in our way of apprehending riches will be needed. AI is only the latest step. The change that came progressively is the increase of productivity: in the past, we needed every body working all day, or we would starve. Now, one person alone can produce enough for several people, and if everybody works, then we produce too much to consume it all.
Yet, society uses work (and capital, but that is another question) to distribute the produced riches. Therefore, everybody needs a job, and thus we invent bullshit jobs, like putting groceries in bags.
Therefore, society must adapt to consider it is normal that not all people work. Let them make art, science, culture instead. Or be couch potatoes, if they want.
But we need to invent a way of distributing riches that is not entirely related to work.
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
You misunderstand the primary purpose of a college education.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Geez...when exactly did this "someone else do it for me" mentality hit the US with such full force and become so widespread?
What happened to self-suffiency?
As the average level of education has increased over the past 50+ years, the percentage of people who understand these problems has increased. So instead of childish notions of self-sufficiency, more people know greater social insurance programs are needed for average people to take levels of risk once only possible for the wealthy. These safety nets have allowed the greatest prosperity in our species' history, and they will need to be seriously strengthened if this prosperity is to continue.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Services that aren't paid for do constitute a gift. If a company doesn't pay taxes, why should it be allowed to recruit from an educated work force, or use public roadways, or anything like that?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes