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Higher-income earners, such as software engineers and data scientists, are more exposed to the impact of artificial intelligence than lower-paid workers, according to the latest research on technology and the labor market.
Nearly a fifth of employees would see at least half of their tasks potentially affected by advances in machine learning, according to an analysis of more than 900 occupations published in science Thursday.
The document highlights the uncertainty about the impact of AI on the labor market. The IMF this week expressed “deep concerns” that generative AI could fuel inequality and disrupt work, even in high-skilled industries.
“Exposure [to AI] It can be good or bad for workers,” said Daniel Rock, co-author of the paper and assistant professor of operations, information and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Right now, it’s very difficult for us to say what the long-term effects on labor demand will be,” he added. “But the exposure measure does tell you where to look and detect where things might change.”
Rock and his fellow authors from ChatGPT creator OpenAI and the Center for AI Governance, a UK nonprofit, examined 923 occupations from a database of job and worker characteristics.
They used humans and a trained GPT-4 large language model to analyze whether the rapidly evolving technology could reduce the time it would take a person to complete a task by at least half, without reducing quality.
They concluded that 18.5 percent of workers held jobs in which 50 percent or more of their tasks were exposed in this way, leaning toward higher-paying occupations.
The most affected jobs included blockchain engineers, clinical data managers, public relations specialists, and financial quantitative analysts. Occupations without exposed tasks included motorcycle mechanics, pile driver operators, and stonemasons.
“Knowledge workers process information and you can think of what these big language models are doing is boosting our ability to process information in different ways,” Rock said.
The research echoes similar findings elsewhere. City of London financial professionals would be most affected by AI applications including image recognition, language modeling, translation and speech recognition, according to a UK government study published in November on the impact of AI on the labor market.
The paper published in Science was a significant addition because it estimated the scale of AI’s implications for various jobs, said Sarah Bana, assistant professor of management sciences at Chapman University.
The research suggested that technology would have a different impact than computerization, which affected less well-paid jobs based on routine cognitive tasks more.
“There are a lot of things that need to happen for these estimates to come true, as the authors point out, but they suggest very profound impacts on the way we do what we do,” said Bana, who was not involved in this research but works with Rock. in other projects.
While the study provided an “interesting insight into hypothetical future scenarios,” it showed a need for more research into the “needs and concerns” of employees, said Mhairi Aitken, an ethics researcher at the U.K.’s Alan Turing Institute.
“It is crucial that studies like this are complemented by insights from real-world experiences with AI,” Aitken said.