American Workers and Their Fear of Becoming Obsolete

A recent poll by Gallup looks at one of the concerns of a significant percentage of American workers; the fear of job loss.  In particular, we will focus of the fear of job losses related to the implementation of artificial intelligence and other technologies.  This is known as the fear of becoming obsolete or FOBO.

 

Gallup polled 522 adults throughout August 2023 with 491 of these adults being employed either full- or part-time.  They were asked the following questions:

 

1.) Please indicate whether you are worried or not worried about each of the following happening to you, personally, in the near future. How about:

 

a.) that your benefits will be reduced 

 

b.) that your wages will be reduced 

 

c.) that your job will become obsolete because of technology 

 

d.) that you will be laid off 

 

e.) that your hours at work will be cut back 

 

f.) that your company will move jobs to countries overseas 

 

2.) Are you worried that you will be laid off?

 

3.) Are you worried that your hours at work will be cut back?

 

4.) Are you worried that your wages will be reduced?

 

5.) Are you worried that your benefits will be reduced?

 

6.) Are you worried that your company will move jobs to countries overseas?

 

7.) Are you worried that your job will become obsolete or unnecessary because of technology?

 

As I noted above, we will focus on the fear of job loss related to technological advances.  Here is a graphic showing the growing percentage of American workers that are worried that their job will become obsolete because of technology:

 

Concerns about FOBO have increased from 13 percent in August 2017 to 22 percent in August 2023, an increase of 9 percentage points or 69.2 percent.

 

The concerns about FOBO vary demographically and have increased over the past two years as shown on this graphic:

 

 

Concerns about technologically-driven job obsolescence has grown the most over the past two years among college graduates under the age of 34 with household incomes of less than $100,000.  It's surprising to see that concerns about FOBO is now more-or-less equal among non-college graduates and college graduates when just two short years ago, only 8 percent of college graduates were concerned about technology supplanting their work lives compared to 22 percent of non-college graduates.  

  

Thanks to Visual Capitalist, we have a clear picture of the American industries that are at the highest potential for automation:

 

 

I was rather surprised to see that architecture and engineering were among the most automation vulnerable industries, particularly given the very specific skill sets and extensive education that are required to perform in these industries.  The most ironclad jobs will be among those industries that rely heavily on manual labour (i.e. construction) and while transportation is relatively safe for the time being, jobs will be threatened by the use of AI-driven automation/self-driving vehicles which is expected to impact the trucking industry over the next 5 to 10 years as shown here:

 

Phase One: will involve a technique called platooning, in which a fleet of trucks will follow a lead truck on the highway

 

Phase Two: technology will have developed enough to have a human driver in only the lead truck while a convoy of autonomous trucks follows closely behind. Expected by 2025.

 

Phase Three: the lead trucks are completely autonomous on the highway. However, a human driver will still likely be needed in the lead truck for navigating small roads and loading docks. Expected around 2030.

 

Phase Four: completely driverless autonomous trucks are on the roads at scale. Optimistic estimates say it will come sometime in the early 2030s, while the more conservative ones say it will take until the end of that decade.”

  

Let's close with this thought.  With the average cost of college in the United States hitting $36,436 per student per year including tuition and fees, books, supplies and living expenses, one certainly has to question the value of spending four plus years educating oneself after high school.  Perhaps those who take jobs as mechanics, carpenters, electricians and plumbers are the smart ones after all.

 

Artificial Intelligence, the American Worker and a Universal Basic Income

With the growing talk of official implementation of a universal basic income picking up momentum in the post-pandemic world, a recent development gives us a sense of why governments will be under pressure to ensure the financial security of their citizens.

  

According to Nation's Restaurant News, McDoncald's CEO Chris Kempczinski told an investor conference being held by AllianceBernstein Strategic Decisions that McDonald's is testing automated voice order-taking at ten drive-through restaurants in the Chicago area.  

  

Let's look back to September 2019, when McDonald's moved into the voice-based and multi-item conversational ordering technology sector though its acquisition of Apprente as shown here:

 

Here is a quote from McDonald's press release dated September 10, 2019 outlining the companies rationale for acquiring Apprente:

 

"Building our technology infrastructure and digital capabilities are fundamental to our Velocity Growth Plan and enable us to meet rising expectations from our customers, while making it simpler and even more enjoyable for crew members to serve guests," said Steve Easterbrook, (then) President and Chief Executive Officer, McDonald's Corporation. "Apprente's gifted team, and the technology they have developed, will form McD Tech Labs, a new group integrated in our Global Technology team that will take our culture of innovation one step further.""

  

The Apprente team will be the founding member of a new, internal group inside of McDonald's Global Technology Team called McD Tech Labs.  This acquisition builds on the April 2019 acquisition of Dynamic Yield, an artificial intelligence company.  According to Dynamic Yield's CEO, the acquisition:

 

'....is great news for Dynamic Yield and McDonald’s customers, as well as personalization practitioners everywhere. Dynamic Yield will play a critical role in McDonald’s digital transformation, allowing it to become even more focused on the customer by deploying our technology in outdoor digital Drive-Thru menu displays, as well as other digital customer experience touchpoints, such as self-order kiosks and the McDonald’s Global Mobile App."

 

Let's go back to the recent revelations made by McDonald's current President and CEO Chris Kempczinski.  He told the investor conference that, while the automated voice-ordering system was 85 percent accurate and can take about 4/5ths of orders in all tests, that it will be some time before the company plans to roll out the system in its 13,673 restaurants (as of December 31, 2020) across the United States and, one has to presume, its 39,198 restaurants around the world. 

 

Here are some additional quotes from Chris Kempczinski:

  

"There is a big leap between going from 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants across the U.S. with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect permutations, weather — I mean, on and on and on and on.  Do I think in five years from now you're going to see a voice in the drive-thru?  I do, but I don't think that this is going to be something that happens in the next year or so...."

 

“One of the things that we've learned in our 10 restaurants that we've done it is: How do you train a crew to actually not want to jump in as soon as they hear a question or a pause?  We've had to do a little bit of training of ‘just keep your hands off the steering wheel, let the computer do its work.’”

 

Kempczinski also noted that staff needed to develop a comfort level with the AI technology: 

 

“We weren't getting enough of the orders to be actually able to be processed through the voice recognition technology, because as soon as there was a question or a hiccup, the crew had a tendency to just want to jump in. And it took a little bit of time to actually learn to trust the technology.”

Yes, by all means, trust (and learn to love) the technology that is going to put you out of a job.

 

As shown on this graphic from McDonald's, over the past several years, the company has increased expenditures on technology at the same time as it is reducing General and Administrative (G&A) spending:

Now, let's take a quick look at McDonald's wages for its front line workers (in the United States in U.S. dollars):

 

Here are the 2020 salaries for the company's Named Executive Officers:

 

If you were to take the salary of a fast food attendant of $9.83 per hour for a 40 hour week, their before tax income would be $393.20 for a week's work or $20,446.40 for a year's work (no holidays).  At this level, a fast food attendant at McDonalds would have to work for 4.92 years to earn the monthly compensation  (including perquisite and benefits) of $100,560.67 earned by the company's CEO.  And yet the company is looking to replace its front line, low-paid workforce with an AI-equipped automatic ordering system, putting untold thousands of workers out of jobs.  

It's no wonder that there is increasing discussion about a universal basic income.  With technology, particularly artificial intelligence, displacing workers on the low end of the pay scale, the American work force is on the cusp of substantial and permanent changes that will benefit only the few at the top of the salary pyramid.  After all, it's all about profits, isn't it?

Implanting RFID Chips - The Next Step in Our Orwellian World

A River Falls Wyoming company, Three Square Market (aka 32M), has gone one step further in this world that appears to be heading toward George Orwell's anti-utopia.  32M will be the first company in the United States to offer RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) chips to its employees; while this isn't particularly unique since chips using near-field communications (NFC) are already being used in contactless credit card payment systems, there is a difference in this offering.  In this case, 32M is offering fifty of its employees the opportunity to get in on the ground level of implanted RFID chips as shown here:

Note that the chip will be implanted in the employees hand between the thumb and the forefinger.  By holding their hand up to a device reader, the employee will be able to purchase items in 32M's micro-market product line as shown here:

Basically, a micro-market is just a small, self-service vending machine-based business that can be located in a business setting, replacing traditional stand-alone vending machines and the ubiquitous room with a coffee maker sitting beside the kitchen sink with the "Please Clean Up After Yourself" sign.  As it stands now, 32M offers several types of payment kiosk options for its customers including ones that accept traditional cash, credit and debit cards as well as biometric fingerprints for payment as shown here:

The Senior Executive Kiosk is equipped with two screens, a paper money acceptor, a credit card swiper, a biometric fingerprint scanner, product bar code scanner and in-kiosk camera.  For a mere $499.95, a customer can add an RFID reader.

For those of us who are concerned about the privacy issues associated with this type of technology, 32M claims that the RFID chip will contain only the information that the employee chooses to associate with it and does not have GPS capabilities that would allow the company to track the geographic movements of its employees since the chip will only be scannable from a few inches away.  As well, the implanted chip will be used to open company facility doors, login to computers and use the companies copy machines; fortunately, for those who lose interest in the project, the chip can easily be removed if the employee so desires.

Thanks to the Snowden revelations and WikiLeaks, we are finding out that all of this technology eventually becomes yet another tool that can be used by the surveillance state.  As I've said before, the rather prophetic George Orwell was just three decades ahead of his time!