Pew survey: ‘AI will impact jobs, but not mine.’
According to a recent Pew poll, Americans believe artificial intelligence will greatly impact workers, but not them.
A Pew Research Center report entitled “AI in Hiring and Evaluating Workers: What Americans Think(opens in a new tab)‘ 62 percent of Americans say AI will have a major impact on workers in general, but only 28 percent believe they will be personally impacted.
Notably, this poll was conducted in December 2022, which was just a month after ChatGPT launched. Since then, we’ve seen the launch of Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing, Google’s chatbot Bard, OpenAI’s new model GPT-4, and countless AI-powered tools adopted by corporations and independent developers alike. This feels like ages ago in our new AI-powered reality.
Google launched Bard despite major ethical concerns from its employees
A “higher proportion” of respondents believe the impact of AI in the workplace will be more harmful than beneficial. The results are reminiscent of an idiosyncratic human tendency to believe that one is invulnerable to bad things happening. This is called optimism bias(opens in a new tab) and it explains why we think we’ll live longer than average, never get divorced, or never get skin cancer.
There seems to be a break here.
Photo credit: Pew Research Center
Other findings from the survey paint a more logical picture of human response to AI. Americans are largely reluctant to use AI to make final hiring decisions, track workers’ movements, and use facial recognition technology to analyze their facial expressions. A majority of respondents, 66 percent, also said they would not want to apply for a job that uses AI to make hiring decisions. Feelings are more mixed about whether AI would be better or worse at screening job applicants, particularly when it comes to whether AI eliminates or reinforces racial prejudice.
Findings on AI racial bias are mixed.
Photo credit: Pew Research Center
But the part where individuals believe they are immune to what is seen as the fourth industrial revolution(opens in a new tab) highlights an interesting quirk in the human psyche. Despite the fact that AI is already widely used in our everyday lives, another Pew poll(opens in a new tab) found that only 30 percent of Americans correctly identified all of the use cases presented in the survey. After being told to brace for the AI revolution, we might have expected it to hit us like a freight train with a flashing neon sign, but the reality is that it has been subtly entering our lives for quite some time oozes.
Given the dizzying pace at which Generative AI is moving, it’s hard not to wonder how respondents would react now.