It's hard to look at a website, talk to anybody in business, or read a magazine for very long these days without encountering something about artificial intelligence (AI). One of the biggest concerns for the average symbolic-manipulator employee, in George Gilder's phrase, is whether AI will replace you in your job. Examples of symbolic manipulators are software developers, accountants, writers, and to some degree sales people and counselors. Hospital nurses and construction workers, on the other hand, are not symbolic manipulators, at least not most of the time.
A company called Trio realized that even if AI was available to replace a lot of these folks, somebody would have to decide to do it. And that somebody would be middle-level managers, for the most part. So last month, they performed an online survey of about 3000 U. S. managers in all 50 states to find out their attitudes toward replacing their employees with AI. And the results are illuminating.
First of all, when broken down by state, there are wide variations in how enthusiastic managers are in replacing flesh-and-blood workers with AI software. Openness to doing this varies from a high of 67% in Maine to a low of 8% in Idaho. Both being fairly rural states, the difference is hard to account for except by cultural factors. If I had to guess, I'd say finding good, reliable workers is more of a challenge in Maine, and so that may be one reason why managers in our most northeastern state would rather skip the hassle of hiring people and go straight to an AI program.
When all states were lumped together, the top reason that managers would replace workers with AI turns out to be pressure from upper management or shareholders, at 36%. Presumably this was one of a list of "choose-one" options handed to the survey respondents. The next most favored reason was for productivity gains (31%) and then cost savings (27%). This pressure from above makes me think that a sheep-like mentality which now and then manifests itself in the boardroom may be why we are hearing so much about AI replacing workers. No CEO wants to be left behind in a stampede to the next great thing, even if the thing turns out to be not so great.
What is perhaps most disturbing to engineers about the survey results is the kinds of jobs that managers see most ripe for replacement by AI. "Technical roles like coding and design" (sounds like engineering to me) were perceived as most replaceable at 33%, while the least replaceable jobs were seen to be sales (11%) and "creative work" at 15%. There are a lot of sales jobs that could pretty easily be replaced by good AI software, but evidently managers still believe in that personal touch that good salespeople can bring to the task. Whereas, engineers and programmers, who are always carried as overhead on budgets, don't have as direct a connection between sales and their salaries as salespeople do.
Independent of the question about whether a given job can actually be done better by AI than by a human, this survey looks at those who would be making the immediate decision to do so. Of course, the options presented to those surveyed were simplified ones. The fact is that rather than making a simple choice between AI and a human in a given job, what seems to be happening is that almost anybody in the symbolic-manipulation business is adopting some form of AI almost by default—some deliberately and enthusiastically, others (like myself) reluctantly and only if it can't be avoided.
These large workplace shifts tend to be hard to discern over the short term, because they happen gradually. Take the development of computer-aided design (CAD) software as an example. My late father-in-law never obtained a four-year college degree, yet in the 1950s he got a good job as a civil engineer and worked for the Texas Highway Department. If you'd visited him shortly after he went to work there, he would have been sitting at a drafting table in a huge room full of guys (all guys) sitting at drafting tables, churning out drawings that were turned into blueprints for the construction crews working on the new interstate-highway system.
Visit that same office today (the building is still there), and you'll see fewer engineers than those old drafting rooms held, and they'll be sitting at computers. The computer can't design anything by itself, and while the engineer is in some sense in charge of the process, the amount of sheer dogwork handled by the computer far exceeds the mental effort put forth by the engineer, who now does the work of ten or fifteen (or more) of the old drafting-room people. And the field of civil engineering didn't collapse: my school (Texas State University) started a new civil-engineering program a few years ago, and we have no problem placing our graduates.
The advent of AI, which has actually been going on for a decade at least and isn't as sudden as news reports make it sound, will probably be like the advent of CAD, only more so. It's easy to forget that the computers need us as much as we need the computers. Take away the largely-human-produced Internet from ChatGPT, and you'd have a lot of useless server farms on your hands.
There are clearly dangers, of course, if we get too lazy and allow AI to make decisions that should remain in human hands, or minds. And there are sectors where AI has already done serious damage, such as the harm AI-fueled social media has done to the psychological health of children and teenagers. But we're not letting the pied piper of AI march away with all our kids. Schools all across the U. S. are starting to ban smartphone use during classes, and parents are wising up to how harmful too-early use of smartphones can be to young people.
Even if all managers were dying to replace their staff with AI as fast as they could, the software simply isn't available yet. At the present time, AI has the looks of a fad, indicated by the survey's showing that pressure from upper management is the biggest reason bosses are considering it. So it's no time to panic, but keep your wits about you and be ready to deal with AI in your job, assuming you still have one.
Sources: The summarized results of the Trio survey can be seen at https://trio.dev/managers-are-ready-to-replace-employees-with-ai/. The San Marcos Daily Record of Oct. 10, 2025 carried a story on the survey on p. 8, which is how I found out about it, from an old-fashioned piece of paper. But then I went online.
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