MIT simulation shows AI can replace 11.7% of U.S. workers worth $1.2 trillion in salaries — Iceberg Index tool shows jobs are affected in every state across the country

AI replacing workers.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) created a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index to simulate the entire U.S. workforce and see how they are affected by artificial intelligence and the government’s policies surrounding it. According to a report by CNBC, the study found that as much as 11.7% of the entire U.S. workforce could already be replaced by AI, which is valued to cost $1.2 trillion in salaries and benefits in various industries, not just in the technology sector.

“Basically, we are creating a digital twin for the U.S. labor market,” ORNL director Prasanna Balaprakash told CNBC. The Iceberg Index records each of the individual 151 million workers and marks them with their associated skills, tasks, occupation, and location. It then relates this data to over 32,000 skills and more than 900 jobs spread across 3,000 counties, and then checks which of these can be replaced by current AI technologies. This allowed the researchers to use the Iceberg Index to forecast the impact of AI before it happened in the real world.