In the midst of a soggy job market, there’s been a lengthy debate over whether contemporary AI is actually replacing workers — or just providing bosses with an excuse to lay off certain employees and offload their responsibilities onto the ones who remain.
The answer isn’t clear, but a new study out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is sure to add fuel to the fire. Analyzing 151 million American workers, the researchers calculated that today’s AI systems are already mature enough to automate the tasks of more than 20 million American workers, or 11.7 percent of the entire labor force, if they were fully deployed across the country.
The researchers examined how many occupational tasks could be automated by AI, along with the dollar value of each task. The total vulnerable tasks — representing an astonishing $1.2 trillion in wage value — give a rough idea of the potential scale of disruption to the $9.4 trillion American labor market, and the huge windfall for any companies that could actually deliver all that automation.
The study’s authors deployed the Iceberg Index, a tool co-created by MIT and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) that simulates how AI could impact an American workforce of 151 million people in every state and not just coastal tech centers.
“Basically, we are creating a digital twin for the U.S. labor market,” ORNL director and co-author of the study Prasanna Balaprakash told CNBC.
The tool simulated each worker and treated them “as autonomous agents executing over 32,000 skills across 3,000 counties and interacting with thousands of AI tools,” the paper explained. The researcher also tracked skills that could be vulnerable to today’s AI systems and measured the “wage value of skills AI systems can perform within each occupation.”
Right now, disruptions from AI amounts to just 2.2 percent, or around $211 billion in wage value; that “represents the tip of the iceberg,” the research team wrote, winking at the possibility that AI is poised to drastically upend the lives of countless workers.
The researchers said the study and index are meant for policy makers to measure the impact of AI and any related legislation and programs on their constituents. That kind of information will be crucial going forward for elected government officials as they balance advanced technologies and the needs of their electorate, the researchers said.
Naturally, people on social media groused angrily about the study while waving around metaphorical pitchforks, saying that the American worker will miss out on what they criticized as unequal prosperity.
“The new American Dream: your company hits all-time highs the same quarter it axes your team,” one online commenter wrote.
“People will be on streets if they don’t wake up to this AI bullsh*t,” another wrote. “Start boycotting!”
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