INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
AI poised to hit high-skilled U.S. jobs, including business, finance and tech.
Artificial intelligence is coming for America’s high-paid professions as it creates winners and losers across the labor market like never before.
White-collar jobs and bettereducated occupations along with production workers are among the most susceptible to AI’s spread into the economy, according to a recent Brookings Institution report that draws on a new analysis of patent data by Stanford University graduate student Michael Webb.
“Webb’s modeling suggests that just as the impacts of robotics and software tend to be sizable and negative on exposed middle- and low-skill occupations, so AI’s inroads are projected to negatively impact higherskill occupations,” researchers Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton and Robert Maxim wrote, noting that their analysis shows potential impacts can be both positive and negative.
Workers with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree, the report showed.
The researchers also concluded that AI appears most likely to affect men, prime-age and white and Asian American workers. Business, finance and technology will be more exposed, along with natural resource and production industries, they found. Farming, one of humanity’s earliest jobs, may also be affected by AI as drones and precision agriculture help boost productivity. Farming, fishing and forestry had the top exposure score of any occupational group. Labor markets upended
The paper is the latest in a growing body of research on how labor markets may be upended by AI, the algorithms that