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Most Americans Think AI Will Destroy Other People's Jobs, Not Theirs (theverge.com) 268

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of U.S. adults believe artificial intelligence will "eliminate more jobs than it creates," according to a Gallup survey. But, the same survey found that less than a quarter (23 percent) of people were "worried" or "very worried" automation would affect them personally. Notably, these figures vary depending on education. For respondents with only a four-year college degree or less, 28 percent were worried about AI taking their job; for people with at least a bachelor degree, that figure was 15 percent. These numbers tell a familiar story. They come from a Gallup survey of more than 3,000 individuals on automation and AI. New details were released this week, but they echo the findings of earlier reports. The newly released findings from Gallup's survey also show that by one measure, the use of AI is already widespread in the U.S. Nearly nine out of 10 Americans (85 percent) use at least one of six devices or services that use features of artificial intelligence, says Gallup. Eighty-four percent of people use navigation apps like Waze, and 72 percent use streaming services like Netflix. Forty-seven percent use digital assistants on their smartphones, and 22 percent use them on devices like Amazon's Echo.
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Most Americans Think AI Will Destroy Other People's Jobs, Not Theirs

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  • yeah forget that (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @11:46PM (#56225425) Journal
    I HOPE it eliminates my job. My job sucks. The only reason I do it is because I get paid. And don't pretend you are any different. Would you go to work if you didn't get paid? No way!
    • Would you rather not do your job and not get paid? Because that's what will happen when the robots eliminate your jobs.

      You have that option now, of course, and evidently haven't taken it, so it's pretty clear you'd rather keep your job and keep getting paid.

      Of course everyone would prefer to lose their job yet keep getting paid anyway, but our robot-owning overlords are unlikely to offer that option.

      • What? No. The robot should pay ME for the honor of doing MY job!
        • It really should, yeah. But it won't.

        • What? No. The robot should pay ME for the honor of doing MY job!

          Yeah, the "robot" will. It's called welfare. In the future we'll give it a fancy name like "UBI" to make you feel better, but make no mistake as to how much Greed will help fund UBI for the unemployable masses; it will be fucking welfare and not a penny more.

          Smile. You won't have to work anymore. You can relax and enjoy your new lifestyle that barely sustains life. At least until you get sick. Then you'll just die, which will be by design. Easiest way to create the necessary cull is to cut off medic

      • by CodeHog ( 666724 )
        basic incomes? I welcome our robot overlords. Now just give me a basic income and I'm good.
    • by Amouth ( 879122 )

      Would you go to work if you didn't get paid? No way!

      yes/no., if all my needs where taken care of (as if i was paid) then yes i would go to work unpaid because i enjoy what i do.

      I know i will never quick working, rather retirement for me will be the ability to pick and choose between projects.

      I do not get up in the morning and dread going into work, that is horrible. Last time that happened I found a different Job.

    • by jiriw ( 444695 )

      Well ... maybe ... I think I would still do similar work, even if it wouldn't net me an income* I could live on. Maybe not for the same clients as I'm working now because I would then be (even more) the one to choose where to invest my time in. And maybe a part of my work will then be invested in projects which will benefit me in a non-financial way. But I'd definitely do similar work. Hell, I already do volunteering IT work for two organizations, beside my regular (part-time 4 days/week) job. And part of m

    • I HOPE it eliminates my job. My job sucks. The only reason I do it is because I get paid. And don't pretend you are any different. Would you go to work if you didn't get paid? No way!

      Sure I would. If job's did not pay a salary I'd either be (a) living in a dystopian civilisation where everybody is a slave or (b) I'd be living in some kind of post apocalyptic world where there are no job in which case my job would be: hunting, farming, fishing, spinning, weaving, chasing cattle and crop stealing freeloaders (the human variety) off my fields and when I'd not be doing that I'd be mixing up gunpowder ... You have to survive somehow and that goal always leads to some kind of work.

    • To be honest, my life right now is pretty similar to what it would be if I were a billionaire and a robot would do my vacuuming (I'll probably get one of those this year) . Yeah, I'd travel more and I'd probably have a luxury condo in my town with a spa, a swimming pool and a small team of cute naked ladies doing all the cleaning and tending to my needs - but I'd pretty much be doing the very same thing I do right now: A little web coding for real-world projects, some FOSS coding, going to college on the si

    • I HOPE it eliminates my job. My job sucks. The only reason I do it is because I get paid. And don't pretend you are any different. Would you go to work if you didn't get paid? No way!
      --

      The problem is, once you're no longer needed to do your job, you can be eliminated as well. And don't think they won't do it. History is replete with examples of the US Government, beholden first and foremost to corporations, treating humans like lab animals. What do you do with lab animals when you're done with them? Usually, you suffocate them.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @11:47PM (#56225427)
    in a nut shell. It's always the other guy that gets screwed. It's so common there's a meme [google.com] for it.

    Plus, I can never seem to get people to understand survival bias. As in "I've survived layoffs so it must be because I'm so damn awesome, and not because I got lucky as hell".

    But Christ people, even if your job somehow _isn't_ the one automated away everybody else is going to be gunning for the few jobs left ya know?

    It's like the man said, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas [google.com]
    • But Christ people, even if your job somehow _isn't_ the one automated away everybody else is going to be gunning for the few jobs left ya know?

      Look on the bright side! This is going to make Purge Day so much simpler this year! ;)

    • Head-in-the-sand is normal thinking everywhere. They look at you like you're just scaremongering.

      And when they realise it is affecting them it's somone-else-should-be-fixing-this-now! And where's-all-my-cuddly-toys-gone?!

      The weather ain't being so nice any longer.

  • by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @11:57PM (#56225465) Homepage Journal

    The difference between people who understand statistics and people who don't is that people who don't understand statistics see a 1% annual chance and think, "This will never happen to me," whereas people who do understand statistics think, "This will eventually happen to me if I live long enough," and plan accordingly.

    It isn't a question of whether any given person's job will be replaced, but rather when. Eventually, nearly everything will be automated. Manufacturing is already mostly there. Retail and fast food will be next, replaced by touchscreen ordering, website-based ordering, delivery robots, etc. The trucking industry will follow shortly thereafter. Doctors likely will be replaced by a machine learning model within a couple of decades at most, though surgeons and nurses will hang around somewhat longer. Police will eventually be replaced by drones. Office workers will be slowly become unnecessary as the people they support cease to work.

    At some point, the only jobs left will be writing software for the machines, designing the machines, jobs in arts/entertainment, and maybe firefighter robot drivers. The only real questions are how long it will take and whether the rate of redundancy significantly exceeds the rate of attrition.

    • nope, your clothing and shoes are made by hand. houses and roads are still made by crews doing a lot of manual labor. how is the work on your cars and trucks done? oh yeah, by mechanics. how is news made? how is building inspection done? oh, by people.

      engineers design things, scientists study things, tradesmen build things, repairmen repair things......

      this won't change anytime soon, because AI is mostly a farce with nothing fundamental new in decades.

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        nope, your clothing and shoes are made by hand.

        Only because the materials used in clothing are flexible enough to make fully automated manufacturing challenging, and even that is likely to change in the very, very near future [fastcompany.com]. Oh, and for shoes, it already has changed [wired.com] to a large extent.

        And even in factories with low levels of automation, large parts of the work are still done by machine. Humans guide the material through the machines, but the sewing is still done by machine, not by hand stitching, which m

        • by m00sh ( 2538182 )

          nope, your clothing and shoes are made by hand.

          Only because the materials used in clothing are flexible enough to make fully automated manufacturing challenging, and even that is likely to change in the very, very near future [fastcompany.com]. Oh, and for shoes, it already has changed [wired.com] to a large extent.

          And even in factories with low levels of automation, large parts of the work are still done by machine. Humans guide the material through the machines, but the sewing is still done by machine, not by hand stitching, which means orders of magnitude fewer people are involved than historically were. So when I say that manufacturing is mostly automated, that includes garments and shoes.

          how is the work on your cars and trucks done? oh yeah, by mechanics.

          The mechanics plug in a diagnostic machine, it figures out what part to replace, and a person replaces it. It's only a matter of time before that final step is automated. Once you train one robot to do the work, you can have a million robots doing that same task for the cost of building the hardware. The leap from robot manufacturing to robot repair is a lot smaller than you seem to believe. The minute one car company does it, they'll all rush to do it, because the labor cost on car repairs is downright insane. Frankly, if any industry is ripe for automation, that's it.

          how is building inspection done? oh, by people.

          Only because buildings are still built by people. When robot house builders take over that industry, the verification will be done by someone signing off on the wiring diagram, and inspections will be as unnecessary as the builders.

          engineers design things, scientists study things, tradesmen build things, repairmen repair things......

          If you look at electronics, engineers design things, machines build things, machines package things up for delivery, and soon machines will handle the delivery, too. If you honestly believe that any other manufacturing industry is significantly different in some way that will make it impractical to automated, I have a bridge to sell you.

          And although you are correct that there will still be people doing repairs for a long time to come, that is true only for the sorts of repairs that involve going to the customer site, such as plumbing, refrigerator repair, etc. Car repairs and electronic repairs are on the short list for automation. Apple is already doing cell phone screen repairs by automated machine. By 2030, the only people doing electronic repairs by hand will be the independent repair shops, assuming the manufacturers' zero-labor repairs don't undercut them and run them out of business.

          this won't change anytime soon, because AI is mostly a farce with nothing fundamental new in decades.

          This has already changed, and if you haven't noticed, it's no surprise that you still think AI is a farce with nothing fundamentally new in decades.

          It seems that a lot of people overestimate AI. There are just so many things that are insanely easy for humans that are really hard for machines.

          People believe some sort of unsupervised deep learning method will come along and solve all these problems. But it might never come. Maybe deep learning will only work well with supervised data.

          We might have to wait for the next breakthrough on unsupervised learning to achieve it and who knows when that will come.

        • by Kjella ( 173770 )

          The mechanics plug in a diagnostic machine, it figures out what part to replace, and a person replaces it. It's only a matter of time before that final step is automated. Once you train one robot to do the work, you can have a million robots doing that same task for the cost of building the hardware. The leap from robot manufacturing to robot repair is a lot smaller than you seem to believe.

          Actually, this is the part where the leap is much bigger than most people believe. Sure, we have tons of industrial-size [google.com] food production. But they're huge one trick ponies, any decent pastry chef [google.com] can make all of these and much, much more in a huge variety of kitchens with different equipment. Creating a robot that's flexible enough makes the costs fly off the charts. Of course we have people selling fantasies [moley.com] of a generic cooking robot but but reality is more like Flippy - for $60,000 a robot arm will flip

          • The mechanics plug in a diagnostic machine, it figures out what part to replace, and a person replaces it. It's only a matter of time before that final step is automated.

            Actually, this is the part where the leap is much bigger than most people believe.

            You're both wrong. Hooray, Slashdot! Stop talking about cars when you don't understand them! Here's how it actually works: The mechanics plug in a diagnostic machine, and very rarely does it outright tell you what is wrong. Usually it's more like "misfire on bank 1, cylinder 3" and then you get to figure out why that's happening. Sometimes you figure it out the old-fashioned way; unless you can literally see the problem, for example, the next step is often to pull the spark plug and "read" it to determine w

    • I do not want to order my coffee/fries/whatnot on a touch screen. I've got that in my pocket already, thank you. I want a young cute lady smiling at me, and recognising me as a regular parton and listening to my wish and extra-special order.

      I can get a coffeebot for my kitchen and never leave home already.

      That is just not the point of it.

      I *want* to go to the japanese quarters [google.de] and have some hot stuff prepare my hot stuff and pay them for it. ...

      One thing's for sure: No bot will replace them any time soon.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      How can you plan for being replaced by AI though? It's hard to predict who what jobs will be replaced in what order, and once it really gets going there won't be enough jobs to go around any more.

      Vote for socialists perhaps?

  • by fredgiblet ( 1063752 ) on Thursday March 08, 2018 @12:12AM (#56225535)
    Self driving cars will replace most of us within 10 years, I'm certain of that.

    Studying to be a teacher, hopefully that'll take a LITTLE bit longer...Hopefully...
    • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
      Interestingly for teachers, it'll be those that teach the youngest kids that who are the hardest to automate, since kindergarteners need an adult human to keep them in check, where as college students can study almost as well from a video of the professor as the professor in the flesh.

      Though if you're really worried, you could try to become a software engineer specializing in automation. That or prostitution I guess.
  • This is a common logical fallacy, guess you could call it the "not me" fallacy. Back in 2016 American's predicted others would vote for Trump, but of course "I'm not voting for Trump, so he won't win!" Go humans. Use that self serving bias of future predictions to uhhhh, keep gambling and such?
    • I'm pretty sure nobody who predicted that (many) others would vote for Trump thereby concluded that he would not win. People who thought he wouldn't win thought that because they thought more people were smarter than to vote for him. People who thought enough people could be suckered into it thought he stood a chance, and they turned out to be right. But neither group did any kind of fallacious reasoning. Nobody's stupid enough to think "everyone's gonna vote for him, but not me, so he won't win!"

    • by quenda ( 644621 )

      A better analogy is the protest vote. People are angry at the establishment, and vote for the crazy guy "who cannot possibly win".

      While Trump was the underdog, he was polling too well to be a simple protest. Either people really believed what he said, or they were so angry they just didn't care any more.

    • by swb ( 14022 )

      I always thought it was people just weren't willing to admit they were going to vote for Trump, especially to pollsters, to the point that the conventional wisdom said he couldn't win.

      And the result was a mash-up of all of it, losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college and thus the election. Pro-Trump wags suggesting it was their 4D chess strategy all along, pro-Hillary wags suggesting he really didn't win since he won the electoral college, and the analysts suggesting that Hillary lost in p

  • The office is mostly Dilbertesque bullshit at most orgs. AI will probably master logic before it masters bullshit.

  • it's a simple routing algorithm with an impressive infrastructure that maintains maps and traffic up to date. UberFreight is AI, otoh - they allow to book freight based on predictions of available supply, taking some losses on mistakes, and maintaining overall profitability.

    Also Waze didn't replace any human service. The old days AAA trip cards don't count.

  • of cognitive dissonance at it's best...
  • If your job is exploration then you have already been replaced. Sorry astronauts and divers. :(

    If your job is to assist someone else in a well defined procedural manner then your job has already or is in the process of being eliminated. This covers everything from prostitutes to builders to lawyers to robot maintenance engineer. Really, it's most jobs.

    If your job is create procedures for someone/something else (generally computer based design jobs) to carry out then the number of people doing your job wi

    • If your job is exploration then you have already been replaced. Sorry astronauts and divers. :(

      Neither of these jobs are fully automated yet, but they soon will be.

      If your job is to assist someone else in a well defined procedural manner then your job has already or is in the process of being eliminated. This covers everything from prostitutes to builders to lawyers to robot maintenance engineer. Really, it's most jobs.

      I'm pretty sure the oldest profession is one where at least some people will keep paying top dollar for the real thing, despite what the futurama video says

      If your job is create procedures for someone/something else (generally computer based design jobs) to carry out then the number of people doing your job will be reduced due to AI assistance making fewer people more productive.

      Untrue. If you consider actual strong AI (human level capable or above), which maybe takes 50 years or 200 but it is comming, all thinking jobs will be replaceable. Cheap androids to replace humans should be here just before strong AI which will completely undercut the price of all

  • For respondents with only a four-year college degree or less, 28 percent were worried about AI taking their job; for people with at least a bachelor degree, that figure was 15 percent.

    Isn't a bachelors a 4 year degree? I mean, it used to be... did something change when i wasn't looking? "Only a four-year degree" is the exact same thing as "at least a bachelor degree."

    • by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      It's not about the duration of the education, it's about the level of the subject matter. Highschool Graduation < College Degree < Bachelors < Masters < Doctorate. Think of it as the difference between going on to a college or vocational course after highschool rather than to a university for a graduate programme.
      • by meglon ( 1001833 )
        Hmm... see, when i went, a 2-year was an associates, a 4-year was a BS or BA, then it went graduate with MS, then PHD. I've just never seen 4-year that wasn't a bachelors.... but then that was 30 or so years ago for me. Even tech colleges have 4 year bachelors degrees (or had....a long time ago...).

        And, the only difference between a college and a university was how many graduate programs it had (or something like that.... the "college" i went to became a "university" a couple years after i graduated,
        • by Zocalo ( 252965 )
          Similar for me (three years for a BSc Hons.), but it does also depend on the nature of the course. Financial, legal, and medical degrees tend to be much longer than arts, humanities, or science degrees for instance - up to seven years for a bachelors in some cases. Four years at college level for your graduation certificate does seem excessive, but not unreasonable if it's one of the new generation of apprenticeship style courses that includes a mix of work placements and formal classroom based education,
  • by uohcicds ( 472888 ) on Thursday March 08, 2018 @05:48AM (#56226245) Homepage

    Up to a third of Americans believe the earth is around 6000 years old, and that evolution is a lie. And increasing numbers believe the earth is flat, in spite of fairly compendious evidence to the contrary.

    So you'll forgive me if the opinions of the American public don't exactly fit me with a sense of confidence or hope in their sense of judgement when presented with inconvenient things like facts.

  • it is human nature to think it will never happen to you.
    it's how diseases spread as well - oh, i will never get aids or some other contagious sickness.

  • It's kind of typical. Most Americans think bad shit is gonna happen to someone else, not them.
  • The capacity for thought seems to be totally absent in many if not most Americans. On top of that there is a really bad history of the brightest among us predicting the future. AI has the capacity to be far more intelligent than humans. Machines are already superior in many day to day functions. That will become more obvious in the near future.
  • Our time is short. When it happens, AI will eliminate our jobs over night.

  • Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of U.S. adults believe artificial intelligence will "eliminate more jobs than it creates," according to a Gallup survey. But, the same survey found that less than a quarter (23 percent) of people were "worried" or "very worried" automation would affect them personally.

    So if AI eliminates more jobs that it creates, and this wipes out exactly 23% of existing jobs, American wisdom of the crowds can properly ascend the podium of clairvoyant American exceptionalism.

    That's the m

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