Q&A

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Your data shows higher perceived automation risk among younger workers and people without higher education. Walk us through who that person actually is. What do they do? What is their background? Where do they live?

It’s quite general; age is the strongest predictor. And then you see it in occupations where pre-ChatGPT people were already more thinking about it. Where tasks are kind of, you can imagine the robot arm coming in and doing it. In those sort of occupations, the fear doesn’t speak so directly to what would happen. I’d love to redo this survey now and see how the distributions have shifted. Now I expect that white collar would be much more in fear as well. Big shift, but again, also towards younger.

I think it’s largely because they’re the ones who are most exposed to technologies and most familiar with them. They’re more and more likely to be using technologies. And they have the least job-specific skills that they’ve already acquired. I think a lot of people who have been sitting in a job for a long time might think, oh yes, this job has things that can be automated, but I have all this institutional knowledge, firm-specific capital, client connections, and whether true or not, for people who’ve been around the block a bit, they think these components are much more important, which can not be taken over by the AI.

You’ve found that automation moves workers wanting to unionize and demanding redistribution from their government, but it doesn’t move them to retrain. And this is exactly what our policymakers are telling us. What do you think is the reason for that gap?

I think retraining is something that, number one, takes time, effort, typically costs money, and creates a lot of uncertainty. If I say today I’m going to retrain to become something else, I not only have to learn that, I have to pay for a course, but I also don’t know what job I’m going to find afterwards. Am I going to find a job? What’s that job going to look like? That’s a jump into the void that people don’t take so easily.

And there’s also doubts about how easy it actually is. People, as they get older, anyone who’s tried to learn a foreign language, knows it gets a lot harder as you get older. That’s why I think we don’t see this immediate response of people saying, oh yeah, I’m going to re-skill, change horizontally, something similar but different, or vertically, that I really go and upskill. And because, hey, maybe that’s also not useful with AI.

I wasn’t too surprised that people were not planning to respond on that margin so much, just because of the cost and the lack of certainty involved with it. Ex-ante, I didn’t expect the response to unionization, especially because unions in the US are not the most popular thing and most prevalent. If we had done the survey in Europe, I might have expected that more, but it is an indication that people are attached to the status quo. We know from many studies that status quo protection is strong. People don’t like something that has been taken away from them. So one way you can protect your job is basically to join a union.

I’m not surprised about the request for redistribution. That was ex-ante probably our biggest hypothesis. Because that has always been a bit the case when things fail, people return to the state. But especially in recent times with COVID, it has become more common that the state is seen as someone who has to provide a solution. We see that now with every energy crisis. Prices are going up and immediately there’s requests for handouts to finance this, caps on energy bills. State-provided solutions. And that’s why that, for me, was very expected given current trend.

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