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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Over 70% of US adults worry about AI displacing human workers.
- Some tech leaders have already forecasted huge job displacement.
- Over 75% of respondents are concerned about “political chaos.”
The majority of Americans are concerned about the potential impacts of AI across a number of key issues, including the job market and political stability, according to a recent survey conducted by Reuters and Ipsos.
The survey, which polled 4,446 US adults last week, found that 71% of respondents said they fear that AI will “permanently” displace an unacceptably high number of American workers. The finding follows closely on the heels of a paper published by researchers from Microsoft, which outlined the job categories most likely to be automated by AI, with information-processing and communication roles, like translators and customer service representatives, at the top of the list.
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Numerous leading figures in the tech industry, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy have also predicted that the AI tools their companies are working to build could displace a significant number of human workers.
Thus far, tangible impacts of AI on the job market have been minimal, with some exceptions; recent college grads with computer science degrees appear to be having a more difficult time getting hired in the tech sector, for one.
Other concerns: Politics, relationships, and energy
The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that many Americans are also wary of the rise of AI for other reasons.
More than three-quarters of respondents (77%), for example, are worried about “political chaos caused by US rivals” wielding AI tools, according to Reuters.
Such fears are well-founded, as the internet has already become rife with deepfake images and videos depicting prominent figures doing things that they never actually did. Increasingly sophisticated text-to-speech models, meanwhile, are making it easier to impersonate the voices of real people, a capability which some bad actors and scam artists have begun to exploit.
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In June, OpenAI released its latest annual report detailing its findings on how bad actors around the world are harnessing its technology for nefarious means. One of the cases included in the report involved an operation probably of Chinese origin in which ChatGPT was used to generate fake social media posts and comments to foster support from human users around politically contentious issues, like the dismantling of USAID.
The majority of respondents to the Reuters/Ipsos poll also reported feeling concerned about the erosion of human interpersonal relationships caused by the rise of AI companions (66%) and the technology’s energy consumption (61%).
