AI can’t replace humans in most jobs becuase of cost, MIT study finds

In one of the first in-depth probes of the viability of AI displacing labor, researchers modeled the cost attractiveness of automating various tasks in the US, concentrating on jobs where computer vision was employed — for instance, teachers and property appraisers. They found only 23% of workers, measured in terms of dollar wages, could be effectively supplanted. In other cases, because AI-assisted visual recognition is expensive to install and operate, humans did the job more economically.

The adoption of AI across industries accelerated last year after OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative tools showed the technology’s potential. Tech firms from Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. in the U.S. to Baidu Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. in China rolled out new AI services and ramped up development plans — at a pace that some industry leaders cautioned was recklessly fast. Fears about AI’s impact on jobs have long been a central concern.

“‘Machines will steal our jobs’ is a sentiment frequently expressed during times of rapid technological change. Such anxiety has re-emerged with the creation of large language models,” the researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory said in the 45-page paper titled Beyond AI Exposure. “We find that only 23% of worker compensation ‘exposed’ to AI computer vision would be cost-effective for firms to automate because of the large upfront costs of AI systems.”

Computer vision is a field of AI that enables machines to derive meaningful information from digital images and other visual inputs, with its most ubiquitous applications showing up in object detection systems for autonomous driving or in helping categorize photos on…