Hyderabad:Since the advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence, the world has been speculating that AI would take away all the jobs from humans. In a sigh of relief, a recent study has suggested that AI is generally, too, costly to fully replace humans in most jobs.
A recent study conducted by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) investigated whether AI could perform tasks more efficiently than humans and whether it was cost-effective for businesses to replace human labour with AI.
The widespread acquisition of AI across various industries gained pace last year, particularly fuelled by the success of ChatGPT and other generative tools that showcased the technology's potential.
The researchers concluded that AI is, too, costly to replace jobs, after taking the broader implications of AI implementation in the labour market into consideration. Only 23% of workers, equivalent to 0.4 per cent of the entire economy, could be efficiently replaced. People perform the task more efficiently because AI-assisted visual identification is costly to install and maintain.
The researchers discovered that computer vision, a branch of Artificial Intelligence, can currently automate tasks that make up 1.6 per cent of worker wages in the US economy, excluding agriculture. Computer vision allows machines to extract meaningful information from digital photographs and other visual inputs.
The study included examples of "vision tasks" that AI could achieve, including analysing images from hospital diagnostic equipment or examining trays, to ensure they contain the correct items. "We find that at today’s costs US businesses would choose not to automate most vision tasks that have “AI Exposure,” and that only 23 per cent of worker wages being paid for vision tasks would be attractive to automate," the authors said.
"Overall, our findings suggest that AI job displacement will be substantial, but also gradual -- and therefore there is room for (government) policy and retraining to mitigate unemployment impacts--they added.
Researchers surveyed employees to determine the share of their tasks that could be accomplished by computer vision. They subsequently developed models to assess cost-effectiveness. They discovered that using AI visual detection to replace workers would rarely be worthwhile.
"We find that the median employee works in a firm where close to none of the vision tasks are cost-effective to automate. Even a firm with 5,000 employees, i.e., larger than 99.9 per cent of firms in the US, could only cost-effectively automate less than one-tenth of their existing vision labour at the current cost structure," the researchers stated.
The study acknowledged that the cost of AI will decrease over time, but the authors don't think it will do so as quickly as some have suggested. They also predicted that it would take some time for AI to have a major impact on these kinds of professions.
Read More
- How AI threatens free speech and what must be done about it
- More CEOs fear their companies wont survive 10 years as AI and climate challenges grow, survey says
- OpenAI-backed 1X raises $100 mn to build next-gen humanoid robots
