A new analysis from MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory is called the Iceberg Index. It is a simulation tool for studying the American labor force, which is currently about 150 million people. It shows that artificial intelligence (AI) could replace 11.7% of jobs in the United States. And that is not a future number.
The forecast is based on the potential effect of AI today. In total, the study covers 932 occupations and 32,000 skills. The authors wrote, “Artificial Intelligence is reshaping America’s over $9.4 trillion labor market, with cascading effects that extend far beyond visible technology sectors.”
A catastrophe of this magnitude could increase the U.S. unemployment rate to 18%. If the study’s figures are on top of the current national jobless rate of 4%, the total moves to 22%, which is a Great Depression level.
The data does not entirely take into account jobs that migrate from traditional positions to AI-created jobs. It does, however, look at how many jobs could be lost by sector. At the heart of the survey, “The Index captures the share of tasks that are technically automatable based on demonstrated AI capabilities.”
The research team does offer some hope. If industries and the government want to get ahead of the worst of this wave, they have to train people. There may also be an increase in infrastructure employment due to AI data center expansion.
The leaders of the group that did the research call some of what they do a “sandbox.” This is what allows policymakers to look across geographic areas and sectors. However, the current analysis does not offer much of an upside. Creating policies that can potentially save millions of jobs is nearly impossible when viewed state by state and employment from sector to sector.
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