Humans preferred: 43 per cent of Germans do not want artificial intelligence (AI) to replace doctors. A similar amount of people in Germany would never use apps such as fitness trackers due to their use of personal data. However, on the other hand, the fear of losing one`s job to artificial intelligence is rather low. This is the result of WIN’s latest survey, which investigates the attitudes of the population of 40 countries worldwide towards innovative Technologies.

Internationally, the opinions are deeply divided on these topics and vary greatly depending on the respondents’ country of origin.

While Germans think highly of their doctors and would not be happy for AI to replace tasks done by doctors in the future, people in Lebanon (22 per cent) or India (24 per cent) would be happy to see a full replacement of doctors with artificial intelligence. This might be linked to the state of the respective health systems.

In Indonesia, 80 per cent of the population strictly reject apps that use personal data, while only 9 per cent of the population in India and Brazil share this opinion. In Germany, it is mainly older people (50 years and older) and people with little education who are very critical of these apps. However, males and well-educated people between 16 and 29 years of age and with a high income usually do not express any reservations in this matter.

The fear of losing one’s job in the next 10 years due to AI and automation is particularly high in low-cost countries. In comparison, 77 per cent of the German population is not worried about this: The higher the level of education, the lower the fear of being ousted by artificial intelligence or automation on the labour market. Especially people aged 30 to 49 do not worry about this scenario.

For this study, a total of 30,890 persons from 40 countries were interviewed globally. 7000 respondents were from the G7 (Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, USA, United Kingdom and France). As the exclusive German member of WIN, Produkt + Markt conducted the fieldwork of this study in Germany in October 2018.

For further interesting results as well as detailed figures, please click here to view the official press release (English).