The Pew Research Center, an impartial think tank that monitors public opinion today released a report on how employees feel about AI.
The technology has become an increasingly common workplace in recent years. And its role is likely to grow as AI becomes more capable, thanks to developments such as the major language models, such as GPT-4, that have given us ChatGPT and a growing number of other tools.
While there’s no shortage of reports on people’s attitudes toward AI, Pew’s data is voluminous and relatively recent, coming from 11,004 US adults surveyed between December 12 and December 18 last year — just as the ChatGPT mania hit the reared its ugly head after its release at the end of November.
The report suggests that most employees expect AI to transform hiring, firing and evaluation. Many people report feeling uncertain about what those changes might look like, and concerned about the possible consequences of AI.
About 68 percent of those surveyed said they expect AI to have a major impact on workers over the next 20 years. Oddly enough, only 28 percent said they thought AI would affect them personally, while 38 percent weren’t sure what the outcome might be for their own work.
Those responses reflect the fact that no one really knows how AI will change jobs and jobs in the years to come. Technology is evolving rapidly and its impact often varies greatly by industry and even by function.
However, we can expect existing uses of the technology to expand and become more sophisticated. Some employers are already using AI to screen applicants, while enterprising job seekers are trying to outsmart the algorithms with clever tricks. In theory, AI technology has the potential to make hiring fairer and increase diversity in the workplace. But in practice, it has sometimes done the opposite, leading the US government to warn employers about the potential of algorithms to discriminate against people with disabilities.
The Pew survey echoes this contradictory picture: 47 percent of people say they think AI would outperform a human in hiring, but 41 percent oppose using AI in hiring.
Surveillance in the workplace is a common concern, with 81 percent of respondents saying increased use of AI will lead to employees feeling inappropriately watched.
Courtesy of Pew Research Center
