Public have more fear than hope on AI and future of work, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Public have more fear than hope on AI and future of work, study finds

kcl.ac.uk

59 pointsgeox43 comments

There is literally nothing in it for me (all productivity gains will be pocketed by my employer) and there are many reasons to be afraid of it.

And the sad part is that it could be such a cool technology it had come about in an earlier time, before consumers and labor lost all their power. It's the combination of the era and the technology that's going to be bad for people more so than just the technology.

It would be cool technology today if we lived in a system that prioritized human dignity and general welfare over the desire of a handful of people getting obscenely wealthy.

> all productivity gains will be pocketed by my employer

This is the story of automation in general, and AI seems to be following the same path.

The balance of 100% of productivity gains accruing to the employer and 0% to the employee may have been the wrong bargain long-term.

Not to mention it's way less enjoyable to use than just doing my job.

I appreciate reading this sentiment and reminds me of "drum machines have no soul."

A common response is usually something like "now I get to focus on the actual engineering process rather than the code" but IMO it's sort of missing the bigger picture and is almost a coping mechanism. People should use whatever tools they want to be productive but enjoyment/happiness should not be thrown out.

People forget that enjoyment/happiness is a nice bonus to have in a job if you're lucky, but it isn't at all necessary. You're hired to create value for your employer, whether you enjoy it or not, and you're free to take it or leave.

Now programmers get to be like 99% of people and just work for the paycheck.

I don't get this argument because a paycheck isn't necessary for the system to "work" either. Serfdom and slavery "worked" for hundreds of years.

We don't live under serfdom or slavery, we live under capitalism. Under capitalism, in the world in which most people live, paychecks are necessary because the labor class has to pay rent on their survival, but only so long as humans are necessary to create value. No part of that requires the humans to enjoy what they're doing any more than draft animals are required to enjoy plowing or pulling loads.

Drum machines had no soul until Roger Linn added a swing/shuffle setting.

> focus on the actual engineering process

I can't speak for anyone else, but in my workplace this is being said by people who have never cared about the engineering process before. It's pure cope

I find building more enjoyable than engineering, personally. Engineering is the boring necessary stuff that needs to be done, building is the fun reward for doing a good job engineering.

Google Lens is handy. Other than that I'll pass on AI.

Funny, it seems Asian countries are more optimistic than Western countries [1]. Maybe this says more about the people running these countries than the technology itself. Technology is just a tool after all.

https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/publi... [1]

2024…as fast as AI changes, these studies should be done more frequently.

2025 survey: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...

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>doesn’t make them any less dangerous in the wrong hands.

what do you think my comment said you halfwit.

Definitely not that

Modern society has taught us human value is proportional to their productivity capacity. i.e. Homelessness it’s seen more like an inconvenience than anything else mostly because deep inside people believe if they were just more productive they would be back on track.

If you add that to the market expectation that most work will become redundant then it’s not hard to see why people are fearful of AI.

Yes i completely agree with this. As many employer say to employees this can be done by AI then what is the use of you guys. These kind of situtation are there

But are they wrong? Should a warehouse have guys carrying around boxes on their back or have a forklift? How many people really want to carry boxes for a job for minimum wage?

Every tool for thousands of years has eliminated jobs. I don’t think the quality of life is down, compared to say the dark ages.

> How many people really want to carry boxes for a job for minimum wage?

There are a lot of people outside the realms of "HN" and adjacent lands for whom having any kind job is necessary for survival.

> Should a warehouse have guys carrying around boxes on their back or have a forklift?

While we can optimize for efficiency -- why should we? for the sake of improved quality of life for those who can already afford it, via an ever increasing wage gap? why do we need to replace them? so a manager can pocket a few extra grand at bonus time? so there can be a few bigger numbers on a spreadsheet somewhere?

what if some of those people end up dying? do you think you could live with that? i know couldn't.

So you would rather promote preventable toil under the theory that there are enough otherwise unemployables that they would literally die otherwise? That there is literally no other useful task that may be performed? I mean we have crumbling infrastructure but strong backs are apparently utterly useless for doing work there....

The rationale sounds a lot more like thought terminating clichés and an emotional rationalization for not wanting to see the world change on you, than any depiction of reality.

> So you would rather promote preventable toil under the theory that there are enough otherwise unemployables that they would literally die otherwise? That there is literally no other useful task that may be performed?

That is absolutely not what i was trying to say.

If you watch any episode of Question Time here in the uk you'll be basically guaranteed to get someone asking about job opportunities. about lost jobs. about the fact that they're struggling to provide for their family because they need a job.

that's what people care about outside of people who have too much money already circles. providing for their family. i care about those people. they want work. they want jobs. they don't want disruption and change and progress. they want stability and to provide for their family.

so, again, why do we need to always optimize for efficiency / the bottom line? why can't we first give a shit about the people who want provide for the family.

that's my point.

India millions of call centre jobs are about to be wiped out. In the third world you don't work you don't eat.

Well now the tools are butting up against the limits of what humans can do, and the people they are going to displace aren't just picking up boxes.

Workers who will be replaced now are already specialized and highly educated in a specific skill. Remember when Obama said that displaced miners and factory workers should "learn to code"? Well where do coders and other highly educated knowledge workers go once we get displaced? I am not disparaging miners more just wondering like... can you squeeze much more cognitively and emotionally out of workers?

It feels like we are closing in on the endgame of 100s of years of improving the tools.

You are right

As someone trying to hire juniors the danger is this: they all just depend on AI now and don't think for themselves or add anything to it. And I have to tell them, if you just pass through my instructions to an AI you're worth $20/month. You're not even checking the responses. Some take this to heart, some don't. In other words it takes more maturity to realize how to be valuable in the AI world, since education trains people to complete rote tasks and they have to break that mindset to be valuable now.

I’m completely burned out because our team has no new headcount as management wants to see how AI tools span out.

Gonna see what happens when I get out eventually. I’m sure my colleagues still have some potentials…

Hmm, maybe it has to do with every tech leader saying "AI will replace humans" for the past 3 or so years.

But idk, I didn't study a PhD in marketing and psychology and whatnot.

I bet people would feel differently if the future didn’t look so bleak. Hard to feel positive about ai when people are hearing all about how fantastic it is, and meanwhile struggling to survive.

I would feel a whole heck of a lot better about AI if we were making progress towards a society where people who work for a living won't die in poverty when there are no more jobs for them.

The glaring truth is no Large company ever says WOW with AI we can do so much more with the same staff. It's always We can do the same, with much less staff.

Maybe because the people behind it are batshit crazy and can barely articulate the benefits themselves? Maybe because it sucks out capital for virtually any other industry while we're not sure we're not in a bubble? Also, corporate culture, slop and hype.

I know I sound like the cliche hubristic mad scientist here but, the public seems completely incapable of thinking of the potential of AI and it is deeply frustrating. Is this what a factory worker oriented school system gets us?

The public is literally being told that white collar jobs are gone. What do you expect?

...which wouldn't be as big a deal if the blue collar factory jobs weren't also gone to the far east. Conceptually, the only non-shit jobs left to automate are artisan-style trades like plumbing and carpentry. These are great careers, and there is probably unmet demand, but they can't possibly absorb the number of new adults we're minting each year.

Absent some kind of worldwide revolution, the U.S. will essentially need to start from zero and work their way up the value chain the same way China did over the last forty something years. It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll.

> the public seems completely incapable of thinking of the potential of AI

I don't think this is true at all. It's more that when faced with something that is making your life worse right now, there isn't any solace in an ephemeral speculation that it might be great in the future.

It's far more concerning that so many people are incapable of understanding the reality of it.

"Hey guys, good news! You will all be made redundant by AI and we, some intellectual elite who somehow think we're not going to be affected by AI think you're going to be happy about it!"

"Oh also, there's a 25% chance it will end all human life, and we keep telling you this as if it's a selling point for some reason".

It is just really hard to be valuable as a person anymore.

In the 1800s if your body/mind worked relatively well you had value. That was all it took.

Then we industrialized everything and having a body wasn't worth much anymore, You needed to have a healthy body/mind and educate yourself in a specific skill.

Now we are staring down a reality where having a healthy body/mind, an education and skillset isn't worth much. So what is next?

At the end of the day we all just want to feel like we have a place, but our kids are looking at a future where they can prepare themselves 24/7 and still be easily replaceable. We probably need some kind of post-capitalist view of human value or people if we keep raising the minimum requirements to have worth in society.

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