The main theme that emerged from the analysis were: owning a robot had a positive connotation on general public, people preferred robots to do household activities where they aren’t involved as a family member but rather as a worker/employee, people want at least 50% of most jobs to be occupied by robots, many people would consider to change their career if they didn’t need to work as a denouement of robots replacing humans, and they wanted to maintain their privacy and are very uncomfortable to even share their name with them.
4.1 Consideration to get a ROBOT
Among the 300+ respondents, the general perception of robots had a positive connotation with over 63% of respondents willing to buy one without even a sales pitch, while about 25% were confused and just over 11% of the respondents totally refused the idea of getting a robot.
When it comes to people saying “maybe I’ll get a robot”, I believe that “maybe” is enough for a good salesman to make a lead and turn to a “yes”. So, it was clear that, given a chance, over 85% of the total population are willing to get a robot in their life.
For people who selected ‘No’, the form directed them to a small sales pitch and asked them to reconsider their thoughts. Given the fact I’m not a marketing agent, the pitch might not be the best in the world but that did seem to grab an additional 10% of the people who initially rejected the idea of owning a robot.
4.2 Work and feature demand.
This was a multiple choice question where the respondents who selected ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ on the previous question had to select at least one option to move ahead. It was the only required question in the entire survey after the initial question. From the bar graph, it’s quite evident that the audience of the survey wanted the robot to do some basic household activities like cleaning the house, doing dishes, act as a videographer, cook, mow the lawn etc.
We can see the trends on vote break when we move from these basic household tasks to tasks that involve them getting more active in our personal and family life like singing karaoke, sitting down at the dinner table with family, giving counseling on children's upbringings and having emotions.
When it came to robots having/expressing feelings, most respondents were hesitant with the feature with only 23 people comfortable with robots having non-limited feelings while more than double of that number wanted robots to have limited feelings.
This MCQ doesn’t have other options like real jobs because they are covered in our next section.
4.3 Jobs for ROBOTs.
A total of 23 different fields were shown as options to select what percent– options ranging from 0 to 100 rising quarterly– of each job should robots occupy. And there were no jobs with majority votes to be 100% occupied by the ROBOTs. Robots got the least amount of votes for 100% occupancy as nurses followed by doctors and most votes for 100% occupancy as delivery guys followed by waiters.
People were more hesitant to give robots full control of any job which involved physical touch and empathy like doctors, nurses, manicurists, babysitters, chefs and surgeons with exceptions to engineers; an inclusion which makes sense because clients favor someone who can understand them as a human.
The respondents were more likely to be comfortable seeing 100% robots on non productive/hospitality works which could be easily automated like delivery person, waiters, customer support, cashiers, parking lot attendants, life guards, peons and construction related jobs.
Except for babysitters, the unexpected outlier, it could be said that the majority of respondents wanted to see robots occupy at least 50% of all the jobs that were enlisted as options in the survey. The jobs included in the survey were: Police, Army, Chefs, Waiters, Drivers, Peons, Customer support, Delivery guys, Engineers, Construction jobs, Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists, Surgeons, Cashiers, Receptionists, Gambling Dealers, Life Guards, Parking lot attendants, Valets, Farm Caretakers, Manicurists, and Babysitters.
The exception of babysitters could be explained by the theory that when our metal box friends occupy most jobs, our working hours and working days would be reduced by a significant fraction, due to which the job may not exist by then. Yet another theory, which makes more logical and emotional sense, could be that we just don’t trust robots enough to give them the responsibilities of our younger ones.
4.4 Data and privacy
On this part of the survey, the respondents had to choose their level of comfortness– comfortable, somewhat comfortable, and not at all comfortable– while sharing their various data with robots. It’s on this part of the survey we get to observe how much we value our privacy. On all the questions, the majority of the answers were inclined towards the ‘not at all comfortable’ label except for one draw between ‘not at all comfortable’ and ‘somewhat comfortable’ for marital status.
The questions on data and privacy section included sharing or allowing permissions for the followings: Name, Age, Address, Job details, Marital status, Vacation plans, Life lessons, Life values, Reason for stress today, Reason for happiness today, Business strategies, Daily routine, Passwords, Bank details/Trust the robot to deposit cash on your bank AC, Record you all time.
A rather amusing finding of the survey, at least for me, was that the respondents were more hesitant to share their name with a robot than their address. In numbers, a robot was 148% more likely to learn about someone’s address than their name if they ever had a chat in the park or office. Address was voted ‘comfortable’ more than any other options in the list as well, followed by life lessons, and life values.
Passwords and bank details were the least trusted data and getting recorded was the least favored privacy breaching activity with robots. Considering the fact most of us save our passwords on some online password savers, it might seem we are contradicting our own decisions, but by the time we have robots in our daily lives biometrics/faceID may replace conventional passwords.
4.5 Jobs after ROBOTs
The last part of the survey asked the respondents to consider the economy sustained by robots in which they didn’t need to worry about working just to earn money and reconsider their current job. The respondent could either select among the jobs provided or select any other job that they’d like to do.
As it turned out, most of the respondents wanted to get involved in the robot making process followed by people who would want to be nothing, writer and scientist/astronaut. It’s fascinating to see a huge chunk of the pie chart covered by people who want to be nothing if they didn’t have to work to have a good life. What is also fascinating is how creative jobs like writers, comedians, painters, consultants, etc. are nowhere to be found in our ‘current job’ section.
This also shows how most of the people, especially in a third world country, give up their dreams, talent and art to take a career that would pay well because they need to feed their family.