Artificial Intelligence is all the hype currently and has been for a while. It is getting more popular than we would like it to be. And with AI’s popularity growing, so is the fear among many job holders. Ever since the AI craze saw a surge, people have been worried about the fact that AI would eat up their jobs and replace them. Is there any truth to this? Well, yes. It is quite possible that Generative AI could replace humans in certain tasks. But is it going to happen anytime soon? Studies suggest otherwise.
A recent study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) gives us a glimpse of a more realistic timeline of when Generative AI could take over human jobs. Spoiler alert, it is not going to happen anytime soon so you can relax. The study titled “Beyond AI Exposure: Which Tasks are Cost-Effective to Automate with Computer Vision” was conducted by five researchers at MIT. They researched tasks that were seen as suitable for AI, these included but were not limited to those tasks performed by teachers, property appraisers, and bakers.
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The study revealed that AI has not evolved as much as the human brain has and how it functions. It doesn’t offer human instinct and intuition despite working on algorithms and patterns. One thing that AI cannot replace is how humans work. It cannot replicate the depth of human conscious and subconscious thought processes. And is lacking in tasks that require intuition, gut feeling, and implicit knowledge. These factors remain integral and unique to human critical thinking and emotional intelligence and cannot be easily automated.
On top of that, another major reason behind this is money. It is not economically viable to replace human labour with AI currently. Setting up AI in a workplace and its maintenance requires a lot of funds. The study noted that a meager 23% of the workers’ wages for the above-mentioned jobs could be replaced by AI. Further, it revealed that even if AI reduces the annual cost by 50%, we might not be able to see half of the vision tasks achieve a machine economic advantage by the year 2026. Adding to that, it was noted that jobs that favour human labour will persist until 2042.
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However, the research also pointed out that even though only 3% of the tasks out of 800 occupations that AI can do are economically automatable currently and majorly require human input, this number could increase to 40% by 2030.
To conclude, AI can impact jobs as most of them are susceptible to automation but this won’t happen immediately. It would require a lot of evolution of AI and a whole other job revolution. Right now what we can do is accept that AI is here to stay and upskill ourselves to make the best use of it. For now, we don’t have to worry about it eating our jobs, as the studies suggest.
