Just when the promising prospects of AI is all set to revolutionize the workplace in the coming years, American workers feel worried about their career and employment opportunities.
Will AI assist them in achieving their goals and strengthen their prospects?
AI vs. The American Workforce
The Pew research report throws some interesting and vital insights into the impacts of AI on the American economy. The survey conducted amongst 11004 American workers found diverse responses, with 62% of them estimating a major impact of AI on their lives by the next two decades.
While 62% of Americans believe AI will have a major impact on workers generally, just 28% believe its use in the workplace will have a major effect on them personally. https://t.co/ExpDNlOsWl pic.twitter.com/biMSX1AUln
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— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) April 20, 2023
The impacts, however, according to the respondents, will no longer be restricted to the American economy only. Instead, the workers feel AI would intervene with their flow of work leaking future prospects of employment. The remaining 22%, however, still think AI will have a minor impact on the economy.
On a clear and statistical data analysis, the report concluded that 32% of American workers felt that the rapid and pervasive nature of AI will hurt more than help.
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13% of the employees from the sample were still hopeful about the far-flung influence of AI and considered it to be a blessing in disguise. The report also indicates the unawareness amongst specific sections of the American population, as 22% of the selected sample were unsure of its impacts.
With the rapid advancements in AI, workers can expect workplaces to implement AI hiring instead of a human-mediated recruitment process. In response to such an estimation, most of the respondents showcased their disinterest in applying for jobs that will have an AI-mediated hiring process.
Some also indicated their worries about losing their jobs owing to higher precision and surveillance at the workplace. Evidently, while AI might be a blessing for companies and their profit-maximization interests, the inherent automated nature of the system might soon erase the manual labor force from their respective positions.
Will American Workforce Workers Embrace AI?
It might indeed be challenging to segregate the American workforce into two groups- one supporting the necessary intervention of AI in the workplace and the ones who are completely against it.
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Instead, the Pew report indicates various responses, difficult to categorize under monolithic parameters. In short, such AI intervention could generate both positive as well as negative outcomes.
While, on the one hand, AI might help companies avoid human errors and optimize their operations through automated processes, the lack of opportunities for the human labor force is indeed concerning. Moreover, continuous surveillance under AI might be both beneficial and harmful.
While on the one hand, such surveillance can guarantee better data safety and privacy along with greater productivity, some employees reported the discomfort of their activities being constantly monitored.
In other words, AI intervention in the workplace could rob employees of their freedom and privacy through surveillance.
Final Note
To sum up, Pew’s research report sheds light on the perception of employees regarding AI and its future.
The research essentially marked out the worry of employees being pushed out of their jobs which might be a direct or indirect impact of using AI in the workplace. The tension between American employees and AI-mediated workplaces is worth noting because of the former’s continuous efforts to highlight the probability of such incidents in the future.
Moreover, the research also highlights the technological gap that still persists amongst the workforce, which in turn might make it challenging for them to accept the benefits of AI, without critique. Is America’s economy slowly replacing the labor force with AI? Only time can tell.
