Gigaom AI Minute – May 4

Transcript

We recently surveyed Gigaom's audience about their views on artificial intelligence. Our audience is primarily made up of business people that have an interest in technology and I would like to use the next several AI minutes to explore the answers.

The fourth question, I think, is very interesting. The first part of it was, we asked, "How likely is it that you and your job will be replaced by automation, before your career is over, before you retire?"

The number of people who said, "Before I retire my job's going to be destroyed," was 12%. Then we said, think of your spouse or most recent significant other--we use that to find another person in their life--and asked, "what about them, what's going to happen to their job?" Here, 22% of people said that their job is going to end before their career is over. Now, think about that, this crowd believes that it's twice as likely that somebody else will lose their job to automation than they will. It turns out this is a pretty consistent finding, when you survey people in one profession and you say, "Are the truck drivers going to lose their jobs, are the custodial people, are the order takers..." by and large most studies bear out that most people think that everybody else's job will be replaced, but their own job somehow will be protected. I personally take from this that people know their own job better than they know other people's, and I think when people look at their own job and they see the difficulty in automating it, that that is probably a truer number than speculating on other people's employment.