Will ChatGPT take your job? These workers are most concerned about AI, report shows

The more exposure working people have to artificial intelligence technology, the less likely they are to be concerned about it supplanting their jobs. That’s according to a Pew Research Center study released Wednesday (July 26) that looks at what types of workers are most running into the emerging technology in the US and how they feel about it.

Based on original survey data and government figures from last year, the finding “suggests that at least to date familiarity for these workers is creating less uncertainty… about the impact of AI,” said Rakesh Kochhar, senior researcher at Pew and author of the report.

Those include more highly paid workers in professional and technical jobs. The study also found that women were slightly more likely than men to have some exposure to the technology, and that Asian and white workers had more exposure than Black and Hispanic workers.

But lower paid workers who have yet to come into contact with AI products like ChatGPT are somewhat more wary, the report showed.

More than a quarter of surveyed workers in professional, scientific and technical services said AI will help more than hurt them. But relatively few workers in hospitality, services and arts – 14% – felt the same way.

About 40% of those hospitality and other workers said they just weren’t sure what effect the technology might have.

“Those workers express more uncertainty than workers who are more exposed,” Kochhar said. “Some of what you’re seeing is the effect of uncertainty.”

The report specifically avoided the question of whether those surveyed might actually lose their jobs to AI.

“By exposure to AI, we refer to the likelihood that the activities workers perform on their jobs may be replaced or aided by artificial intelligence,” the authors wrote. “We make no determination as to whether workers may lose their jobs as a result or gain new jobs, and we also do not consider the role of robots.”

Concern about AI automating instead of augmenting jobs has been around for years. Another Pew report published almost a decade ago that canvassed nearly 2,000 tech experts found that about half believed digital agents like AI and robots would replace significant numbers of blue-collar and white-collar jobs by 2025.

That was a larger question that was just too hard to quantify at the moment, Kochhar said, especially with the speed at which AI development seemed to be moving.

“It’s such a new technology whose reach in the future is going to be far greater than it is today,” he said. “We don’t know the speed of how it will extend across the economy.”

Separately, on Monday (July 24), Elon Musk said “digital superintelligence” combined with robots could make many goods and services “almost free,” speaking a few weeks after he announced his own foray into the emerging industry with his company, xAI.

The uptake of AI has been rapid since November when OpenAI released its ChatGPT AI model. Since then, tech giants like Microsoft and Salesforce have begun to incorporate the technology into their products.

That is a far cry from the most recent US Census Bureau numbers, from 2020, cited in the report, which found that less than 3% of US businesses reported using technologies like machine learning or machine vision software to produce goods or services. – San Francisco Chronicle/Tribune News Service