MIT study finds AI is already capable of replacing 11.7% of U.S. workers

"In total, it maps more than 32,000 skills and 923 occupations across 3,000 counties. In an interview with CNBC, Prasanna Balaprakash, ORNL director and co-leader of the research, described this as a "digital twin for the U.S. labor market." Using that base of data, the index analyzes to what extent digital AI tools can already perform certain technical and cognitive tasks, and then produces an estimate of what AI exposure in each area looks like."

"The new estimate comes courtesy of a project called The Iceberg Index, which was made through a partnership between MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a federally funded research center in Tennessee. According to its website, the Iceberg Index "simulates an agentic U.S.-a human-AI workforce where 151M+ human workers coordinate with thousands of AI agents." In simpler terms, the tool is designed to simulate precisely how AI is poised to disrupt the current workforce, down to specific local zip codes."

A project called the Iceberg Index, developed by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, models a human-AI U.S. workforce where 151 million human workers coordinate with thousands of AI agents. The model represents each worker as an agent with skills, tasks, occupation, and location, mapping over 32,000 skills and 923 occupations across 3,000 counties. The index analyzes how digital AI tools can perform technical and cognitive tasks and estimates AI exposure by area, producing an overall estimate that AI is currently capable of performing about 11.7% of the labor market. Several state governments are already using the index to plan workforce responses.

Read at Fast Company