The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

"We built an AI and it told us how good AI is."

Start with middle management please.

This is the shittiest time line.

Horse shit. Not a single example of what exactly “AI” will replace, just a bunch of hand-wavy “the simulation says” quotes. Just another “news” article in the endless stream of bullshit propaganda, most likely funded by the AI bullshit machine.

To be clear: this data comes from an agentic AI simulation.

12% of the workforce is CEOs?

I think it's time for tech CEOs and healthcare CEOs to fear the common man.

If one CEO doesn't play ball, have them catch an assassin's bullet and let their replacement know he better tighten the fuck up or he will be next.

To maximize labor savings, I think the AI could definitely replace the C-Suite of all companies. The humans currently in those roles are already wrong about what is actually needed at the ground level so no one will notice.

I have questions about the macroeconomic implications of AI replacing jobs. Does this mean that those workers will shift to other non-AI jobs? Or does this mean that unemployment goes up and there just aren't any jobs for people any more?

The way I am thinking about this, if corporations are able to hoard more wealth and increase profits substantially by getting rid of the need to pay people, how does the economy function if the money that would be paid to those workers is no longer circulating back into the economy?

If people then will get money from a UBI instead of labor income, who pays the government taxes? Corporations? Consumption taxes on people?

If corporations manage to get labor costs to near zero, profits go to near infinity, which is the goal of profit maximizers. But then there is no money in the hands of individuals to be able to pay to consume the goods or services these corporations provide? Is this desire to replace human labor with AI not just a living example of the myth of Icarus?

Any economists out there interested in breaking these issues down into more of a layman language for me? Thanks!

I feel like you have to make a lot of underlying assumptions to call a hard shot like this, but to be fair I didn't read the study.

I would say we should start a people’s economy that cuts out shareholders and focuses on the needs of the majority and stop honoring a corrupt system that allows billionaire South African apartheid Nazis and Israel to own our government and make us fuedal slaves. Stop honoring a social contract that doesn’t honor the people

Wow, AI replacing over 10% of the workforce? Talk about a game changer! I hope they're planning for the potential unemployment crisis that could come from this.

ceos make up 11% of the workforce? That's way higher than I thought!

I propose we do fun stuff like replace all traffic control, cars, airplanes, boats and trains all to ai. Remembering that AI currently only really can choose the best possible word and not a word that has actual intension. If that doesn't end badly too quick, let's do all cooks and pharmacists. Then we can do all wall street investment. If all that works, then we can have several AIs argue with each other about nukes, the winner decides to launch or stay.

Grok did a horrible job of unclogging my toilet.

I guess nobody is asking what happens IF 11.7% of the workforce is replaced. It’s like sawing the branch that you’re sitting on.

“Sure we helped destroy the economic system, nobody has money to buy our products, but hey we saved 2 million last quarter!”

Is that 11.7% part of middle management or C-suite? That's about the only aspect of any business that could be reliably replaced with AI

I guess if 11.7% of your workforce is unreliable dumbasses then they could be replaced by AI

CEOs and billionaires first.

I'm hungry.

much as $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services.

Would love to see an actual example of them being better than a person in these fields.

I am sure the AI companies will take care of use when they take all of our jobs.

Which specific 11% of the workforce are we comfortable being totally unaccountable and unthinking? 

Honestly the only thing I see current level AI reliably doing without being used as an assistive tool is grunt info work. For example a lot of T1 customer service positions can moreorless be replaced out with the current level of LLM's that we have. Many T1 support roles consist almost entirely of searching the current customers issue, copy/pasting a boilerplate solution list of what may fix it, asking "did that work?" and if not escalating to the next tier. Hallucinations at this level won't have a very big impact outside of annoying the customer and the t2 when it gets escalated because it failed to fix the issue. Said system shouldn't have control over anything, it should strictly be information based. Anything management wise or financial wise or general output of merchandise should not be using these technologies standalone, at most it should be an assistive tool to a human in that position.

In comparison level 5 self driving would replace 30% of the workforce, and 5% of workers being unemployed is the expected normal background rate

11.7% is hardly anything

Let me know when they replace the overpaid C-level parasites with cheaper, faster, more efficient AI CEO/CFO et cetera.

I say this as someone generally bullish about AI: bullshit. I use it all the time. It's helpful when you already know what you're doing. Anything you do with AI at scale is going to have a number of fuckups, even if it's mostly reliable — and for most purposes I wouldn't even go that far.

I see it all the time. I ask Cline to have Claude do a bunch of things and create a markdown file... and it does everything, including generating the markdown, but forgets to put it in a file and then acts confused when you say to put it in a file. If that was some financial report or contract, it could tank a whole business.

Breaking news 11.7% of the work force are doing useless work, work that leadership has no idea how essential it is, and some that a normalized response of text or semantic searching can be replaced with.

I'm sure there is plenty of chaff to cut in finance and healthcare etcetera, in my heart I want to believe in a coming Burger Decimation, but US labor statistics are absolutely cooked. Having read practically nothing about the model they're using, I would appreciate if anyone can tell how accurate it is.

I think a lot of people are really taking AI as more functional that it currently is. I think the bubble is gonna burst in more ways than one

Project Iceberg

Is the economy the Titanic?

So the US is going to setup basic income right?