LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) – More and more people now fear a robot – or an algorithm – could take their job. That’s according to a study recently published by Texas Tech University.
Austin Lee, an assistant professor of journalism and creative media industries at Texas Tech, started the study in 2016.
He sent out a survey asking a random selection of people across the country how afraid they were of certain things, including heights, spiders, and AI. At that time, about 16.6% of people surveyed indicated they had fear of AI.
“In 2016, when we started the project, well, there was no ChatGPT,” Lee said. “The level of AI we encounter every day was Siri, Alexa, and that’s pretty much it. So the overall level of fear was pretty low.”
As the technology and public awareness increased, the fear increased. 49.2% of people surveyed in 2025 indicated they feared AI would take their job.
Lee and Milad Jalalian Ebrahimi, a master’s student and research assistant, emphasize that the results give insight into psychology based on what’s most on people’s minds and are not indicative of actual job loss.
“During the COVID pandemic, [the fear of AI job loss] was decreased because people feared COVID. The most important fear was disease,” Ebrahimi said. “After that, ChatGPT was invented and came out to the public, so people started to fear it more.”
The research also reveals women and ethnic minorities describe greater levels of fear than white men.
“When we started our survey, the gap between males and females was very small,” Lee said. “But it has almost doubled over the 10 years and we find this very alarming. This is about how AI can strengthen existing inequalities.”
Before 2024, Lee also says people with less education feared AI-related job loss more than people with higher degrees. As time goes on, however, he says the demographic-based fear gap is becoming narrower.
Lee says both blue-collar and white-collar people, regardless of educational background, now share the same amount of fear.
Lee and Ebrahimi say this hesitancy is typical for most emerging technologies and could easily decrease as other circumstances arise.
“It would be like what happened when computers were invented and came to our society,” Ebrahimi said. “At first, people resist any kind of new technologies because they don’t know what will happen.”
Both researchers said they compared the fear data with economic indicators, such as unemployment rates, and found no significant correlation between the two.
There is very little data to show how or where artificial intelligence is replacing humans in the workforce so far.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment sits at 4.1% and more than 160,000 jobs were added across all sectors in August.
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