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MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce (www.cnbc.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/usa@midwest.social
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, or as much as $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services.

The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The index simulates how 151 million U.S. workers interact across the country and how they are affected by AI and corresponding policy

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[–] 8 points 8 months ago (1 child)

I say this as someone generally bullish about AI: bullshit. I use it all the time. It's helpful when you already know what you're doing. Anything you do with AI at scale is going to have a number of fuckups, even if it's mostly reliable — and for most purposes I wouldn't even go that far.

I see it all the time. I ask Cline to have Claude do a bunch of things and create a markdown file... and it does everything, including generating the markdown, but forgets to put it in a file and then acts confused when you say to put it in a file. If that was some financial report or contract, it could tank a whole business.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Doesn’t that sound just like a real person though? It forgets shit and you have to correct it because you’re not paying it very much and it has pretty little training. You could always pay it 20 bucks a month or you could pay a small salary and insurance.

    I’m certainly not advocating for getting rid of people, but the way you worded it – not trying to start a fight – sounds just like a low level employee

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    I don't agree with your premise. However, I don't have a good argument against at hand.

    There are intangible benefits to a person, and I feel like the number of roles where AI could perform well enough and mistakes don't cause customer satisfaction issues, regulatory compliance issues, or incur civil liability are vanishingly small. But could they be 10% of jobs? Even 5%? I don't think so.

    I could see an argument that if you have a team of 10 people, AI could let you cut one and expect the other 9 to pick up the slack. But how many teams even have ten people on them? Because I don't think a team of 5 can lose one person and still be capable of the same work. I guess it might depend on the industry — I do have IT blinders on here.

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