Whether or not you went to college, work with your hands, or go into the office, many workers have one thing in common: They’re growing more concerned that A.I. is going to take their job.
Nearly one-quarter of U.S. workers (22%) are worried that rapidly advancing technology will soon render their job obsolete, according to a recent Gallup survey that polled 1,000 workers. Fear of tech has grown seven points since 2021, it found, while other concerns have remained mostly flat. Gallup calls the trepidation FOBO, or “fear of becoming obsolete”—a play on FOMO, or fear of missing out.
The response to Gallup’s survey mirrors the rapid uptake and advancement of A.I. in recent years. Prior to the pandemic, the share of workers concerned their job would be commandeered by a machine had hovered between 13% and 17%, the researchers wrote. Workers with a college degree were the most antsy—those worried grew from 8% in 2021 to 20% this year—proving that even the most time-honored method of remaining employable isn’t quite as trustworthy anymore as it once seemed.
As for workers without a college degree, they’ve always been anxious about tech replacement—their rate of concern held steady at 24%—and those who went to college are finally catching up with them. Younger workers are more nervous than older ones, and workers making under $100,000 per year are more anxious than their better-paid counterparts. Both men and women, however, were equally concerned, Gallup found.
Across the board, redundancy is the main stressor. After being replaced by technology, respondents’ biggest concerns were being laid off (20%) and having their hours cut (19%). That’s not hugely surprising given the enormity of this year’s waves of layoffs. Nearly a third of workers in a recent survey said they’d take a 25% pay cut to avoid being laid off.
The fear is overblown for most workers, experts say
Workers’ fears may be a bit overblown given the limits of tech’s current abilities, but they aren’t unfounded. Indeed, the more workers know about ChatGPT, the more likely they are to be nervous that it could eventually rival humans, especially in fields like data analysis and data entry. “If I were fully remote, you could replicate me with A.I.,” Stanford economist Nick Bloom said last month. “You could get close to my image. You could do my voice. You could probably get much of the discussion from ChatGPT.” But most workers don’t have reason to worry; only those whose jobs are “fully remote, relatively low-level things like call centers, data entry, payroll,” Bloom said. “This stuff is at real risk of being replaced by A.I. in the next three to five years.”
It’s unlikely for most workers to be replaced by A.I., but it is likely that workers in many industries will find that A.I., deployed correctly, can make them more productive. That requires knowing how to best put it to use. Bosses at all levels “need to force” themselves to understand and use A.I., Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, told Fortune’s Peter Vanham in June. It’s incumbent on leaders, regardless of how old or non-tech-savvy they are, to get up to speed on the applications and potential of tools like ChatGPT and Bard, Tangen said.
“If you’re an older person, and you don’t really have experience, get some of the young guys to help you,” he said, adding that new iterations of A.I. have “kind of turned the value of seniority upside down a bit.” He called the software a democratizing force. “You can be an idiot like me and get value out of it, because you basically just talk to the machine,” he said. “It’s really unbelievably powerful.”
Then there’s the matter of a skills gap between workers who do and don’t know how to use A.I. to carry out their basic job functions today. As soon as this year or next, A.I. fluency will become inarguable for workers to stay competitive in the job market, Andy Bird, CEO of education giant Pearson, told Fortune earlier this year. “In many ways, technology and A.I. are moving faster than real life,” Bird said. “We’re struggling to catch up, and the impact that has on us both as individuals and as companies is the need to continually re-skill and upskill.”
A large portion of French pharma and healthcare giant Sanofi uses A.I. daily, its CEO Paul Hudson told Fortune. “There are going to be companies that [don’t adopt A.I., and] really try to hold everybody back,” he said. “I think they won’t be able to compete.”
Despite the ample evidence that A.I. could pose a threat to a handful of repetitive, uncreative roles, most workers aren’t shaken up—yet. Gallup’s results found that fewer than a quarter believe the threat is imminent, and they’re not any more concerned today than they were in 2021 about job security or making ends meet.
They’re right to be calm, unless they work in the most straightforward, uncreative jobs, which will “dwindle hugely,” Joseph Fuller, a management professor at Harvard Business School told Fortune. “I wouldn’t want to be someone who does the reading or summarization of business books to send out 20-page summaries.” Likely, none of the Gallup respondents want to, either.
