Two thirds of Americans believe that robots will take over their jobs in 50 years
There is no denying that the future belongs to robots and AI. However, what do humans feel about robots taking over jobs? A new study conducted by Pew Research Center dwells just into that.
The study revealed that no less than two thirds of Americans expect robots to be in charge of most of the work currently done by humans in approximately 50 years, but when it comes to their jobs, they don’t think machines would be able to do them.
The study reveals that Americans are pretty confident of the responsibility they carry out won’t be matched by robots even though they would take a chunk of the work limited to humans for now. Going into the details of the study shows 65% respondents believed that robots are very likely to take some jobs currently done by humans while only 32 percent of them said this isn’t going to happen.
Only 18% of the surveyed users seemed pessimist about their job prospects in future while a lot 82% seemed unconcerned about the threat posed by Robots in stealing their jobs away.
The survey, conducted in the summer of 2015, surveyed 2,001 adults.
The survey only corroborates what academics and experts have been saying for years. A widely cited 2013 study from Oxford University found that roughly half of all U.S. jobs are at a high risk of disappearing due to advancing technology in the next twenty years.
Like robots, AI is also going to impact jobs in future. We recently had Google’s AlphaGo defeating a human champion in the brain game Go in a three match series. The development of artificial intelligence has led to programs that can interact with humans and understand their requests.
Facebook and IBM are also working on similar AI projects. Facebook looks to take on humans in Go while IBM’s Watson are now working as hotel concierges even beating our best Jeopardy players.
Ray Kurzweil, head of engineering at Google, is on the opposite side of the fence. He believes that replacing a worker with a robot is good for humans. He believes robots could free humans from doing menial work and let them concentrate on high value precision work.
“We are going to have new types of jobs creating new types of dollars that don’t exist yet and that has been the trend,” Kurzweil said in an interview at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. “We will be creating more profound music, literature, science, technology.”
