22/11/2019 AI poised to impact high-skill US jobs including finance, tech | The Star Online

AI poised to impact high-skill US jobs

including finance, tech
AI

Friday, 22 Nov 2019 11:00 AM MYT

By Jeff Kearns

White-collar jobs and better-educated occupations along with production workers are among the most susceptible to
AI’s spread into the economy, according to a Brookings Institution report on Nov 20 that draws on a new analysis of
patent data by a Stanford University economist. — Reuters

Arti cial intelligence is coming for America’s high-paid professions as it creates winners and losers
across the labour market like never before.

White-collar jobs and better-educated occupations along with production workers are among the
most susceptible to AI’s spread into the economy, according to a Brookings Institution report on Nov
20 that draws on a new analysis of patent data by a Stanford University economist.

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"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 higher-skill occupations,”
researchers Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton and Robert Maxim wrote. 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, nance, 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, shing and
forestry had the top exposure score of any occupational group.

The paper is the latest in a growing body of research on how labor markets may be upended by AI, the
algorithms that can learn to handle tasks by nding statistical patterns in data rather than by
following directions from people.

The ndings also highlight how much remains unknown about the effects of AI versus other types of
automation on jobs, and that while the impacts may be concentrated more in some areas than others,
the technology ultimately could affect work in almost every occupational group. Some 740 of 769
occupations in the analysis could be "exposed to, complemented by, or completed by AI”, the
researchers concluded.

The category of market-research analysts and marketing specialists has the highest exposure to AI,
according to the report’s scores, followed by sales managers, computer programmers and personal
nancial advisers.

While high-end jobs face an impact, that may not go all the way to the top: "the most elite workers –
such as CEOs – appear to be somewhat protected,” the researchers nd.

Metro areas

Geographically, the bigger, more technologically oriented metro areas that are heavily involved in
manufacturing are likely to experience the most disruption, according to the researchers with the
institution’s Metropolitan Policy Programme.

Exposure to AI will be greatest in the eastern heartland from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico
given ties to manufacturing in states including Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee
and Alabama. Washington state also is highly exposed because of the concentration of advanced
manufacturing and technology in the Seattle area, the home of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc,
as well as Boeing Co’s main aircraft plants.

Patent data

The report by Muro and his colleagues builds on their earlier work though takes a new direction
because of their partnership with Stanford economist and Ph.D. student Michael Webb. In his paper
out this month, Webb combines descriptions from a US Labor Department database of occupations
and tasks with the text of patents containing information about what technologies do.
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There were more than 640,000 applications led and 338,000 patents issued last year, according to
the US Patent and Trademark Of ce. They give owners the exclusive right to an invention, and the
applications for them can show where research funding is spent.

Webb uses a natural-language processing algorithm – itself a kind of AI – to extract the verb-noun
pairs from the patent lings, such as how a doctor’s job description might include the task "diagnose
condition”. Then he quanti es how many patents correspond to technology with similar verb-noun
pairs, such as "diagnose disease”. Finally he uses the prevalence of those patents to assign a score to
the task, and aggregates the task-level scores to occupations.

Men and women

AI is less likely to be able to take over in situations where relationships between people are key,
which means men are more likely to be affected than women, Webb said in an interview. "Women are
much more likely to be in occupations that require strong interpersonal skills,” Webb said in a phone
interview.

Webb also cautioned that timing is a big question: "We are too early in the development of AI to
know how much more of the technology there is to be developed, and too early also to know how
long it will take to be adopted,” Webb wrote in the paper. "If history is a guide, the main impacts on
the labor market may not appear for three decades.”

Muro and his colleagues emphasise that the ndings don’t have a time element.

"Webb’s novel procedures demonstrate that we have a lot to learn about arti cial intelligence, and
that these are extremely early days in our inquiries,” the researchers wrote. "What’s coming may not
resemble what we have been experiencing or expect to experience.” – Bloomberg

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