By Rédaction Africa Links 24 with Guardian Nigeria
Published on 2024-01-24 03:12:45
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has recently released a study demonstrating that it is still more cost-effective to use humans for certain jobs than artificial intelligence (AI). The study addresses concerns about AI replacing human workers in various industries, revealing that AI is only profitable in a few select industries at present.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has also projected that nearly 40 percent of jobs globally will be influenced by AI, with advanced economies expected to experience a higher impact compared to emerging markets and low-income nations. To counter the impact of AI, the IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva, has called for governments to establish social safety nets and provide retraining programs for workers.
MIT’s study found that computer vision, a field of AI that enables machines to derive meaningful information from digital images and other visual inputs, is most beneficial in industries such as retail, transportation, warehousing, and healthcare. However, the study revealed that AI could only effectively replace 23 percent of workers in terms of dollar wages due to the high upfront costs of AI systems. In many cases, humans were found to be more cost-effective than AI-assisted visual recognition due to the expensive installation and operation costs of AI systems.
The 45-page paper titled “Beyond AI Exposure,” from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was funded by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and used online surveys to collect data on about 1,000 visually assisted tasks across 800 occupations. The study concluded that only three percent of such tasks can be automated cost-effectively today, but that number could rise to 40 percent by 2030 if data costs fall and accuracy improves.
Neil Thompson, the Director of the FutureTech Research Project at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, commented on the study, stating that “there will be more automation in retail and healthcare, and less in areas like construction, mining, or real estate.” This suggests that while AI may have a significant impact on certain industries, its cost-effectiveness is still limited in many sectors.
Read the original article on The Guardian
