"High-Income Earners in the Financial Sector More Vulnerable to AI Than Motorcycle Mechanics"

1 in 5 Jobs Can Be Replaced by AI

A study has found that high-income workers are more affected by artificial intelligence (AI) than low-wage workers.

On the 20th (local time), major foreign media reported that this result appeared in a paper recently published in Science.

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

Researchers from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and the UK non-profit AI Governance Center investigated 923 occupations in a database of job and worker characteristics. They analyzed whether AI technology could reduce the time required to complete tasks by more than half without quality degradation, using humans and the GPT-4 large language model (LLM).

The investigation found that 18.5% of workers were employed in jobs where more than 50% of tasks could be made more efficient by adopting AI, with a particularly high number in high-income occupations.

The most affected jobs were blockchain engineers, clinical data managers, public relations specialists, and financial quantitative analysts. On the other hand, motorcycle mechanics, file driver operators, and stonemasons were found to be less affected by AI adoption.

A similar result was reported in a study released by the UK government last November. At that time, it was shown that London financial professionals would be the most affected if AI were introduced in image recognition, language modeling, translation, and speech recognition.

Daniel Rock, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the paper, said, "Knowledge workers process information. What LLMs do can be thought of as enhancing human abilities to process information in various ways." He added, "Exposure to AI can be beneficial or harmful to workers. At this stage, it is difficult to say what the long-term impact on labor demand will be. However, measuring exposure indicates where changes might occur."

Meanwhile, on the 17th, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pointed out that generative AI improves productivity and advances public services but exacerbates large-scale labor disruptions and inequality. It reduces high-skilled and blue-collar jobs, worsening income and wealth inequality. This conclusion contrasts with the recent study.

Foreign media explained that these research results demonstrate the uncertainty regarding AI's impact on the labor market.