Robots with artificial intelligence cannot match some of the enticing advantages that humans still offer, and this could help keep humans employed for some time to come.
Many businesses have long harbored concerns about AI robots taking over human jobs, and with the technology’s rapid advances since last year, a lot of those concerns have reappeared again. However, most of us do not need to be afraid just yet, as it turns out that most jobs are still much too expensive to automate using AI.
At least, that’s the conclusion of a recent study titled Beyond AI Exposure, which was conducted by five Massachusetts Institute of Technology academics. The study delves deeply into the practicality of adopting AI systems to replace human labor in a variety of industries, with a particular emphasis on activities requiring computer vision skills, such as those performed by property appraisers, instructors, and bakers.
The report’s startling conclusion was that only 23% of workers’ earnings for such tasks might be cost-effectively replaced by AI systems. “Even with a 50% annual cost decrease, it will take until 2026 before half of the vision tasks have a machine economic advantage,” the study’s authors said. “By 2042 there will still exist tasks that are exposed to computer vision, but where human labor has the advantage.”
According to the researchers, even if the cost of AI systems reduces by 20% every year, it would take decades for computer vision jobs to become economically viable for most businesses.
The project, which was funded by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, used online surveys to collect extensive information about 1,000 visually aided tasks across 800 different occupations. According to the report, just 3% of these tasks are currently cost-effectively automatable. However, this figure could climb to 40% by 2026, provided that data costs fall over time while accuracy rises.
The researchers provide persuasive arguments as to why AI is unlikely to replace most people’s occupations shortly. Although AI systems excel in picture analysis and pattern recognition, the technology that powers them is expensive to deploy and maintain.
As a result, in many use cases, continuing to rely on human abilities and intuition would most likely be more cost-effective, according to the authors. AI also has issues with power consumption, which causes substantial practical hurdles.
One of the challenges is that, unlike humans, which have both conscious and subconscious mental processes, AI is limited to statistical and symbolic reasoning. It can nevertheless struggle to execute tasks that need implicit knowledge as well as intuition or gut feeling, both of which are frequently used to inform critical thinking and emotional intelligence. AI will not be able to reproduce such skills in the near future because they are indispensable in many businesses.
That does not mean that AI will not have an impact on some jobs. The banking, marketing, healthcare, legal, retail, and transportation industries have all been identified as potential prospects for increased automation due to the number of repetitive operations involved. As a result, machines can cost-effectively replace humans who perform these tasks.
For example, a Goldman Sachs analysis from 2023 claimed that generative AI might affect up to 300 million jobs, or 18% of global employment. The MIT study also notes that advances in AI-related to data accuracy and efficiency have the potential to dramatically enhance automation. However, for the time being, it appears that the fear of AI stealing many occupations is overstated.
