Anthony Onesto breaks down a Suzy survey on AI fears and readiness. Only 22% feel knowledgeable about AI, while a third worry it will kill their job. One in five think their skills make them irreplaceable, and just one in six have taken AI training.
22%
18%
27%
15%
One in three (≈33%)
The winds of change are blowing. Regarding artificial intelligence and its impact on jobs. Here's some insight that maybe you didn't know. Hey everyone, it's Anthony Ernesto and this is my Burn the box drop for this week. It's about the public perception of AI and job security. It's here, folks. AI is here. It's what everyone is talking about these days. But I wanted to take an understanding of a different perception of AI. Not my perception, but the one of the public, the general public. How are they feeling about AI and its impact on jobs, on their work? So what did I do? I went to Susie and I said, hey Susie, what do people think about these things that would be cool, obviously in the future, hey Susie. And then you just say what you want. But at least for now, I typed in a bunch of different questions and I got back some really, really interesting information. So let's first look at the numbers. And these numbers are from Suzy, the platform. So what Suzy is it's a market research platform that has its own proprietary panel of US consumers and global consumers. So we asked them about AI and basically what we found is knowledge varies in AI greatly. With 22% of the folks on Suz considering themselves highly knowledgeable about AI and 18% non knowledgeable. And then you go and you dive in and gender and age gaps actually exist. The younger folks and male respondents actually trended more knowledgeable. Shocking, right? Young men thinking they know everything. Most believe AI will significantly impact job availability in their industry within 10 years. 27% think it will moderately reduce job availability, while 15% believe it will increase availability. And again, men and younger people are more optimistic about the impact of AI. One in three are concerned about AI affecting their current job. One in three. So one out of three people are concerned about AI and they're right. I think it's going to impact everyone's job. Opinions on split on whether AI will create jobs or displace jobs. I think most folks, some of the folks that are pessimists, will see that AI will take some jobs. I think generally the researchers say there'll be a net neutral. I don't necessarily agree with that. I think there's probably in the short term going to be more jobs taken over by AI and then over time realizing what the different needs are there. One in six report undertaking some sort of training to improve skills in AI, which is really interesting. One in six is actually fairly small and I feel like everyone around me is really diving into AI. So it's interesting to see that at a Consumer level that only one in six are actually taking training right now. And about one in five believe their skills, their own skills make them irreplaceable by AI. Like AI is not going to take my job and everyone feels like it won't. So what do we have to do here? Well, we have to brace for impact. What we have to do. The message is loud and clear. Most professionals realize AI will significantly transform their industries. We're starting to see this already. There's a bunch of buzz around and some of it is false, some of it is true around AI essentially replacing customer support folks. Klarna was a great example of these things. So how do we prepare for this? Well, we're going to see jobs transform. There's going to be some destruction. And what I mean by that is there's going to be jobs that are absolutely transformed by AI. Some of it is going to be augmented. So they're going to make people better AI. And this was actually the combination. I've talked about the book Race against the machines written by two MIT economic professors, professors about 12 years ago that looked at the same thing. Is AI going to take over? Machines going to take over. And it's the combination of machines and humans that the best, that's the best equation. But I think in the short term there are going to be pieces and wholehearted jobs that are going to be automated by AI, but in other places it's going to augment, it's going to make you better. You know, performance enhancing kind of AI is really where we're going or at least removing some of the day to day tactical work. And this was the promise over, I want to say 15, 20 years ago where we talked about nearshore offshoring, where the opportunity was like, hey, let's remove some of the less more tactical elements of your job and let's make you more strategic. I think we're going to see that a lot more. Particularly with AI, you see it in all the different industrial revolutions, automobiles, railroad, electricity, the Internet, when it came out, all these sorts of things, we see this general fear of things changing and then we come to the fruition that yes, things are going to change. And actually wrote a blog article about this specifically about a year ago where I talked about how organizations are going to change their could be the first ever billion dollar company that has a handful of folks. We saw that with Instagram. We're going to see different organizational structures. So what do we need to do here? Yes, we need to burn the freaking box. So many years we Were like, hey, think outside the box from a creative perspective. But what if there is no box? What if the box is the construct that's keeping us away from the final solution? What if we don't think inside the box or outside the box? We burn that damn box. And I think that's what we really need to do. AI expert KE Fu Lee talks about the idea of hyphenating your job. So it's like a auto mechanic or AI HR person or AI radiologist, that augmentation of AI within your role. So we really need to think differently about our jobs Again. Read the book Race against the Machine. Andrew and Eric, the professors from mit, put together and concluded that it's machines and people that will be the final equation. One of my favorite authors and thought leaders, Peter Zion, I've talked about him countless amount of times. He was recently asked about the impact of AI jobs. He is warning about the chip deficiency, let alone the impact of AI. But he sees it in a couple of different sectors. Agriculture, manufacturing, finance and defense, crypto, cybersecurity. But really is more concerned about the ability to deliver on AI promise with the shortage of chips and the deficiencies there. So the future really remains unwritten. AI is going to force us to burn that traditional career box. It's going to afford us tremendous opportunities and destruction in the short term. And when we're going to look at this and say are we going to be more productive? And the optimist in me says absolutely. We're going to be all augmented by technology, in some places completely automated, but bringing more of a strategic element and what I believe to be a greater connection to the human side of business. That's my burn the box for this week. We'll see you next time.
