WASHINGTON, September 19 — Twenty-seven percent of U.S. workers now say they worry technology could soon make their jobs obsolete, the highest reading since Gallup first asked the question in 2017. The figure that matters here is the direction and the speed. That 27% is up seven percentage points from a year ago and roughly double the 13% Gallup recorded in its first reading nine years ago.
The finding comes from Gallup’s Work and Education survey, conducted Aug. 3-24. The rise stands out because it runs against everything else Gallup measures about job anxiety.
Worry about the four traditional threats to employment and income — layoffs, reduced hours, lower wages and benefit cuts — barely moved over the past year. Benefit reductions remain the most common of those four at 33%, followed by layoffs at 24%, with reduced hours and lower wages each at 21%. All four sit near their long-term averages since Gallup began tracking them in 1997.
College graduates close the gap
Over the past year, technology worry rose among workers with and without college degrees alike — six points to 25% among college graduates, eight points to 29% among those without a degree. Those levels are now close, and that is relatively new. In 2017, college graduates were less likely than adults without a degree to fret about technological displacement.
Concern among graduates then climbed sharply from 8% in 2021 to 20% in 2023, the period when generative AI tools such as ChatGPT emerged. After holding steady last year, worry rose again in both groups, keeping the gap slim.
Age tells a sharper story. In 2017 and 2018, workers aged 18 to 44 and those 45 and older expressed similar levels of worry. Since then, concern among younger workers has grown while older workers’ worry has stayed broadly flat.
Younger workers now exceed older workers by a 15-point margin, 34% versus 19%. Among workers under 45, technological displacement now ties benefit reductions as the most prevalent job concern.
Thirty-four percent worry about technology making their jobs obsolete, against 32% worried about benefit cuts, 30% about layoffs, 29% about reduced hours and 25% about lower wages. For workers 45 and older, benefit reductions remain the leading concern by far at 34%, while 19% worry about technological displacement.
The historical pattern
Gallup’s four traditional measures have long tracked the economy. They were relatively low in the early 2000s, peaked during and just after the Great Recession, declined between 2017 and 2019 when more Americans rated the economy positively than negatively, and rose sharply during the pandemic in 2020. Technology worry does not follow that script.
At 27%, it now exceeds three of the four traditional concerns Gallup tracks. College graduates are less likely than non-college graduates to worry about layoffs, wage cuts or reduced hours, but they are nearly as likely to worry that technology could make their jobs obsolete.
For both groups, benefit reductions remain the top concern. Investors will note that the anxiety is not yet pervasive. But it is climbing, and it has now overtaken several job worries that historically rise and fall with the business cycle.
The next Gallup reading will show whether the AI-era concern keeps climbing or levels off the way it did last year.
