REPLACING human workers with artificially intelligent bots will actually be more expensive, according to new research.
The findings are contrary to current fears that AI will easily replace humans in the workplace but the researchers still think this could happen in the future.
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Experts at MIT conducted a study and found that using AI instead of humans right now is not cost-effective for certain tasks.
Despite this, the researchers think there will still be substantial job losses in the future due to the new technology.
They published their findings in a new working paper.
It states: “We focus on computer vision, where cost modeling is more developed.
“We find that at today’s costs U.S. businesses would choose not to automate most vision tasks that have “AI Exposure,” and that only 23% of worker wages being paid for vision tasks would be attractive to automate.”
The study involved imaging AI doing “visual inspection” jobs.
This included bakery-style tasks, in which ingredients had to be checked.
The researchers didn’t think that AI was necessarily bad at this job.
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They estimated that the cost of getting the software wasn’t financially worth it when companies could still use human workers.
It was noted that this cost could be reduced over time.
That means jobs that require a lot of visual inspection and those similar could eventually be at risk.
They wrote: “Overall, our findings suggest that AI job displacement will be substantial, but also gradual – and therefore there is room for policy and retraining to mitigate unemployment impacts.”
Positives of AI in the workplace were also alluded to.
This included the improved productivity that AI could bring.
