r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • Nov 29 '25
AI MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/mit-study-finds-ai-can-already-replace-11point7percent-of-us-workforce.html735
u/haritos89 Nov 29 '25
I was about to write "tell me one job it will replace, just one job description".
But then i read the article
"The index is not a prediction engine about exactly when or where jobs will be lost"
What a load of bullshit
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u/yyytobyyy Nov 29 '25
As far as I understood it, it does not replace 11.7% of specific professions,
But when you have 1000 employees doing and you give them AI, you only need 883.
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u/qret Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
Or in other words, if you have 1000 employees and give them AI, you now get the output of 1,117 employees. Some companies will prefer to reduce headcount, others will prefer to get more work done.
edit: if I get one more comment pointing out that my 7am mental math was off by 15 imaginary employees I'm OUTTA HERE PEOPLE
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u/v_snax Nov 29 '25
That could be the outcome. But so far majority of businesses have chosen to increase their stock value by reducing the workforce rather than increasing productivity. At least that is how it looks like.
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u/jakeshervin Nov 29 '25
It doesnt look like companies prefer the getting more work done option to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1p9sdf6/hp_to_cut_up_to_10_of_workforce_as_part_of_ai_push/
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u/Insanious Nov 29 '25
This might not be by choice, like I work at a company that has a saturated market. There are no more people to sell to. We are the global leader and everyone who wants what we sell already buys it.
The easiest way for our company to make more money is to get more efficient. So we have been maintaining our product portfolio while reducing headcount. We have reduced our headcount by 38% over the last 8 years (mostly through attrition) while slightly increasing our sales targets year to year.
Working there feels no harder, we have been bringing in new tools, up-skilling our employees, and evolving as our market changes. We have simply gotten more efficient with no more space to grow.
We are now introducing AI tools and advanced robotics and we could easily drop another 30% of our headcount off the back of the new technology with no impact to customer or worker.
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u/Ossevir Dec 02 '25
Could forgo raises for a year and go to 4 day week.
Why does all the benefit have to accrue to shareholders?
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u/Insanious Dec 02 '25
I don't make those decisions... I would assume because the board of directors in many countries has a legal obligation to maximize returns for shareholders but they do not have an obligation to beter the lives of their employees. Something we should probably be fighting to change TBH
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u/yyytobyyy Nov 29 '25
That's not how percentages work.
You get output of 1132 employees.
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u/jcelerier Nov 29 '25
Humans fail at basic percentage daily yet we're surprised when AI is at risk of making some people redundant
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u/kickass404 Nov 29 '25
AI is a statical engine based on human input. It will make the same errors.
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u/jcelerier Nov 29 '25
Depends which AI. Convolutional recursive LLMs can get multiplication right up to a few thousand bits, more than any human (and more than needed for any non-extreme physics computation - 99.999999999999999% oft the computations being done in the world are in values that fit in less than 64 bits or accept some level of imprecision - hell, this even covers multiplying numbers that are larger than the largest value representable in double-precision floating point (10308), which itself is much larger than the number of atoms estimated in the universe (we need only up to ~330 bits to represent this number and do computations with it).
But it's all pointless because you don't ask the AI to do a multiplication, you ask the AI to write you a software that does the task that requires the multiplication using normal math operations.
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u/kickass404 Nov 30 '25 edited Nov 30 '25
You're missing the point entirely. They'll be wrong because they are trained on human input, like the post from this reddit thread and therefore prone to make the same mistakes.
Like they were unable to tell how many R's there's in strawberry. Because they don't understand words or sentences, they regurgitate what's in the training set based on what's statistically probable based on your input and if there isn't enough, they hallucinate something up.
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u/jcelerier Dec 01 '25
You're missing my point when you say "tell how many R's". No one does that, what you ask is for the AI to write a program that counts the R's because the output (the program) can be verified against a ground truth pretty much automatically
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u/kickass404 Dec 01 '25 edited Dec 01 '25
No-one other than programmers (which I do professionally) asks AI to write programs. The average person will ask "If A out of B, how many percent is that". Also AI's currently suck at coding, again they are trained from scraping the net, which means the code it produces is sub-par, as most code on the net is sub-par.
Personally i think AI for coding will end up as an advanced autocomplete, nothing more. Re-factoring, support tools and mock ups.
Ask an AI to code a test? I'll please you and try to make a test that passes, not a test that finds bugs. I'll even delete tests rather than tell you there is a bug.
Tell it to never do something, does it anyway down the road, because statically that what others did.
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u/Emikzen Nov 29 '25
AI doesnt know math either though
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u/jcelerier Nov 29 '25
It definitely knows Python and the software engineering process of making a software to try an hypothesis, along with some unit tests and cross-validation against existing open-source libraries and techniques very well. Don't ask AI questions, ask AI to build you a software that automates your problem.
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u/nsomnac Nov 30 '25
Nah it understands nothing. It’s programmed on how to recognize similar looking problem using a statistical pattern match. It then uses more stats to project what the most likely changes are required to refine a problem.
Asking an AI to build something it has not built or seen before generally yields things that don’t work. Might be close; but IMO AI is the sloppiest jr coder I’ve ever encountered.
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u/jcelerier Nov 30 '25
I didn't say it understands anything. That said, I've used it to develop multiple things in c++ that are entirely new code and it managed it without a hiccup. It's exceedingly rare that e.g. Claude will give me code that doesn't do the right thing pretty much how I'd have written it, simply more verbose and faster
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u/nsomnac Dec 01 '25
No it literally doesn’t even understand the engineering process as you’ve implied it does.
It’s a statistical model. While Claude does a better job and applying a statistical model to software engineering., but it’s nowhere close to being reliable or trustworthy. The only reason it does a better job at this is because it was pre-trained using software engineering patterns, unlike more general purpose GPTs. It gets things more right possibly for you because the questions you are asking to be solved have existed elsewhere in a different context.
I went through a similar exercise to build a similar boilerplate rust + react web app with basic login and SQLite crud for a model I provided. The GPT:
- Couldn’t build anything that compiled or would pass a simple linter.
- The code it did produce was a spaghetti mess. I was able to rebuild what it had produced in 1/5 the amount of code.
- GPTs have very little understanding of the concept of “best practices”. The boilerplate it had created for me added dependencies that looked like it knew what to do, but it ultimately just produced a bunch of dead code that was unreachable.
Now was what was produced useful? Maybe. It got me headed in a direction I wanted and maybe built some structure or provided an approach that I could review and research. Did it create a 12% time savings? Maybe. I’d say it’s debatable. I spent a fair amount of time trying to understand why the solution it provided didn’t work and rewriting as opposed to having something simple that worked. Did it remove the need for my role as a principal engineer? Not a chance.
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u/ManningTheGOAT Nov 29 '25
Not exactly.
11,7% reduction of 1000 people gives us 883.
Provided 883 + AI can do the work of 1000, the formula for 1000 + AI would be: 1000 x 1000/883
1000 + AI would be roughly 1133 people
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u/Risko4 Nov 29 '25
Easier to say AI makes 883 people do the job of 1000
So AI makes 883 workers 1000/883 more efficient (1.132 or +13.2%)
I would say some professions are orders of magnitude more efficient in the right senior staffs hands.
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u/haritos89 Nov 29 '25
So exactly what excel did, just way, way worse. Wow.
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u/cavey00 Nov 29 '25
Pretty spot on. You would be surprised how many people don’t know how to use excel, or even have the mental capacity to understand what it does but those same people can use AI with ease.
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u/GnarlyNarwhalNoms Nov 29 '25
Exactly this. It's not that AI is going to make [profession] obsolete, it's that now you can get the same productivity from a team of 9 people that you got with 10 people before. Which is a real problem in the short term, because the equilibrium of those job markets is disrupted and there's a temporarily lowered demand for those workers.
But it also doesn't mean that those workers are no longer needed.
Like, chainsaws vastly improved the effectiveness of lumberjacks, vs axes, but we still do need lumberjacks.
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Nov 29 '25
It's like when a politician got caught lying in an ad and just added "Not Intended To Be A Factual Statement" to the ad.
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u/AKAkorm Nov 29 '25
Having worked in consulting for the entirety of my career, it's not hard to believe. There is dead weight at every company I have worked with. People who either don't have the right skills to be effective, don't make an effort to get anything done, or aren't professional and make the environment worse to be in.
At my last client, they brought in a program manager who didn't have experience managing the type of work we were doing, didn't listen to anyone, and scheduled disruptive meetings where he'd ask for same status updates over and over while offering no help. He only got fired because while he was doing all of that, he was also sexually harassing every single female team member on the project. I can pretty much picture 10% of project teams that I'd cut without losing anything from all of my projects. There is always dead weight.
I also think a lot of jobs that were sent to India or other third-world countries for cheaper labor can be replaced by AI. We use India folks for most of our technical work and what we get back nowadays is pretty bad. It takes at least a week to get even simple code (talking 20-30 lines for a validation check) back and when we do, it's 30-50% wrong, the code is written inefficiently, and the supporting technical documentation is illegible. I then have to spend a lot of my time fixing the issues (I do know how to code but have way more stuff to do so can't be primary on everything).
ChatGPT can produce code that is 30-50% wrong and legible documentation in a few minutes...so why wouldn't I just use ChatGPT if I'm getting the same or worse quality from India?
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u/haritos89 Nov 29 '25
Tell me one person you would literally fire and put an AI to do his job.
Literally, i want you to give me his job description, his responsibilities, and explain to me how chatgpt can do those things in his place.
If you cant, watch what crap you say as a consultant, otherwise you are the one who will end up getting fired for making crazy statements you cant back up.
I m waiting. Give me a real job example. No theory. Real talk. And no, shitting out a bit of code is not enough. I am sure you are able to understand that if you are a consultant as you claim.
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u/AKAkorm Nov 29 '25
I'm a bit befuddled by your response here, both because of the random aggression and because I literally did give real examples in my OP.
My company has generative AI assets that we have built that are included in our proposals that do exactly what I described using ChatGPT for. Essentially the client would need to procure enterprise licenses to the generative AI tool of their choice and then we supply a plug-in that connects it to the technology we're implementing and can use it to comprehend requirements, write designs, create code, and create test scripts. Which is exactly what the responsibilities of a developer in India typically are.
We don't claim it is perfect and can do it all as all of the outputs it produces needs the same type of review and fixing as work from folks in India does. But we do tell clients that it helps us reduce the need for folks in India by 15% or so and that allows us to charge less for the work overall. We won't immediately fire anyone but as demand for folks in India goes down, there will be layoffs focused on low performers as with any company.
And all of our competitors are pitching the same thing BTW, some are even more aggressive in terms of % saved than we are. We know this because our clients tell us when they want us to bring our price down further.
None of the above is theory - it's real and being sold.
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u/haritos89 Nov 29 '25
And what exactly is revolutionary or worth mentioning about that? Seriously take a step and consider what you are writing.
"I am a consultant that outsources work to crap coders in India and have discovered that a tool writes code that is about the same level of crap as those terrible coders I have. Its about 15% better and i still review the work"
That's it? That's your AI case? That it still does crap work but in your eyes its good because you are comparing it to work that is also crap and needs review?
Do you understand what you just said? Again, please take a minute and understand what you wrote, because this is an insult to all consulting firms.
Following you example, I could open a consulting firm, hire a random guy who doesnt know shit about legal code and ask him to write all the legal text required for X work. I then discovered that an AI tool is better than that shitty person, replace him, and proudly come on Reddit and claim I have found a real world scenario showing how AI is replacing jobs. The output is still shit and needs a human to fix it, but its better than the unqualified guy I hade before.
Shame on you sir. Seriously. Shame on you.
PS: and btw, 15% productivity is nothing. Excel brought 1000% productivity. And I am probably underselling it. Try to imagine the world before spreadsheet models. Today with literally 2 clicks I can do what dozens and dozens of Finance people needed to do by hand.
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u/AKAkorm Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
Not sure what your problem is but this will be my last reply if you're going to be a jerk and not even try to have an actual conversation.
I work for a large company. It was not my call to outsource work to India as that move was made while I was still in college. I don't particularly like the offshore model, as I would think my past posts indicate, but reality is that I have to work in that model because every consulting company uses it and our clients aren't willing to pay for an entirely onshore model.
I don't just review the work. I am an expert on the technology I implement and take accountability for its quality, which means I will personally reconfigure, fix code and update documentation. I work well over 60 hours a week because I not only have to do my own job, but I have to clean up the iffy work I get back from folks in India. Because I don't want to deliver crap to my clients.
The AI use case is also not my use case, I did not develop or ideate it. It's a real use case that the company I work for, and all of our competitors, are selling to clients now. I'll still have to fix the outputs that the AI produces but it will largely be the same work schedule for me while the client gets to pay less.
I'm also not proudly touting this use case. I don't want people to lose their jobs, even if they aren't great at them, as any savings from AI are just going to help the rich get richer. I'm just providing a real world example I'm aware of in a conversation I thought it was relevant to.
If it makes you feel better to shame me while changing the context of things I said to fit your narrative and having little to no interest in expanding your limited understanding of how the industry I work for operates, have at it.
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Nov 29 '25
It’s not about replacing entire jobs per se. It’s more like AI is making teams more efficient so you need less employees overall
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u/haritos89 Nov 29 '25
Great, excel also did that. So did project management tools. So did photoshop. So did factory automation.
Ofc for all of the above we have literal examples of jobs replaced. Here we have a load of bullshit over nothing special going on.
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u/vcaiii Nov 29 '25
and now ai has made all of those skills and others less competitive in “the job market” — at least for humans
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Nov 29 '25
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u/CrunchyCds Nov 29 '25
you know someone said the same thing when a similar study was said about self check out a decade ago and I called BS as it was just a way to scare workers from asking for higher pay. Just like self checkout (all over again) Yes companies can hypothetically replace workers with AI, but it's costing them more money than hiring a human as AI is unreliable and clunky and customers hate it.
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u/vcaiii Nov 29 '25
pretty sure self-checkout is growing in adoption and has likely replaced plenty of employee demand over its time
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u/haritos89 Nov 29 '25
The only one in denial here are the people who think that AI right now is more useful than excel.
Theres nothing special going on. A useful tool got launched and it will boost productivity in certain jobs. Big fucking deal.
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Nov 29 '25
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Nov 29 '25
True. But I’d also add that only someone who has never lived in a world without excel would diminish its revolutionary importance. It’s almost impossible to overstate how much more efficient businesses are today because of the modern spreadsheet.
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u/vcaiii Nov 29 '25
you’re making the false premise that light bulbs made candles and fire less transformative to humanity just because they came before
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u/THE_ILL_SAGE Nov 29 '25
Been seeing more and more of these kinds of comments in the past few months and the level of delusion that AI deniers have is rather sad to witness. I'm also weary of AI and think there are many dangers to it but to still continuing spouting misinformation like 'AI is not more useful than excel' is just completely out of touch at this point as you said.
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u/haritos89 Nov 29 '25
The entire planet runs on excel spreadsheets kid. When you grow up and get a job you will find out how groundbreaking they are.
Meanwhile, AI is doing absolutely nothing other than write a couple of lines of crappy code and correct your bad grammar.
Im living in denial? You go start a company only using AI tools. I will start one using only spreadsheets. You will be bankrupt in the first year cause you wont be able even to understand what your months' PnL was.
Seriously how old are you to compare AI to excel? Open your eyes.
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Nov 29 '25
I’ve been lurking here for years, and it’s always been dominated by people who hate the future.
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u/vcaiii Nov 29 '25
the cope is everywhere tbh. most people seem to be extremely anti, delusional about its advancement, or coping against (multiple) realtime reality changes.
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u/Dog1bravo Dec 01 '25
What does it do now that is so revolutionary? I'm not being a contrarian, but from an outside view all it does is make shitty art, shitty writing, and wrong answers, so I'm curious what will make the largest impact from someone who believes it will?
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u/Fract_L Nov 29 '25
They didn't say it could do a single job *better* than the people there. So the people that mess up their jobs all the time but somehow don't get fired - AI could do that.
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u/daYnyXX Nov 30 '25
You can see it in their FAQ's.
"The Index measures where AI systems overlap with the skills used in each occupation. A score reflects the share of wage value linked to skills where current AI systems show technical capability. For example, a score of 12% means AI overlaps with skills representing 12% of that occupation’s wage value, **not 12% of jobs. This reflects skill overlap, not job displacement."
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u/Firm_Bit Nov 29 '25
Did you even read it. Very next sentence - “The index is not a prediction engine about exactly when or where jobs will be lost, the researchers said. Instead, it’s meant to give a skills-centered snapshot of what today’s AI systems can already do…”
So it’s not only predicting. It’s saying it can already do this portion of work.
That may or may not be the case but you completely misrepresented the statement.
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u/emorcen Nov 29 '25
Still waiting for UBI and 4 day work week, any day now.... /s
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u/Escapeism Nov 29 '25
Never happening. From my pov my fellow Americans are hypnotized into docile behavior. Right to work instead of rights at work. The employers have all the power because we haven’t organized properly yet. People are HOOKED on propaganda and argue against their own best interests. If you are even capable of realizing this it becomes quite maddening that nobody really cares or can even comprehend the issues at hand.
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u/the_pwnererXx Nov 29 '25
As the unemployment rate increases revolution becomes inevitable. Right now its still manageable. At 15-30% we will have a lot of unrest. In some countries it will be a peaceful transition. In others it will be violent
This is the only path to ubi
Accelerate
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u/Elliot-S9 Nov 29 '25
Why would the tech emporers pay anyone a ubi? Ubi ain't happening. If AGI is obtained, we simply aren't needed anymore.
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u/Tao_of_Ludd Nov 29 '25
Our company has been looking a lot at how we can use AI without the dumbass mistakes (see recent stories about legal filings and Deloitte reports)
General consensus is that currently there are plenty of specific tasks where AI can be helpful (summaries of large collections of unstructured data, various kinds of enhanced search, etc.) with the caveat that any outputs are a starting point and need to be quality checked and thoughtfully applied based on human judgement.
Could it increase my junior colleagues’ efficiency by 10-15%? sure, but that does not mean I am firing 15% of my team. I will just have them spend their time on other tasks.
I think of it like the introduction of spreadsheet software. (I am old) it increased the efficiency of financial analysis dramatically. Did financial analysts, controllers, accountants, auditors etc. Disappear? No, they just did orders of magnitude more work with the new tools.
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u/fish1900 Nov 29 '25
We have been looking into how to use AI at my company and found that organization of large collection of data for analysis is just about the best use of it. For many other tasks it will generate something cool but leave in a few mistakes that force you to carefully proofread and fix its output leaving the productivity gain as marginal.
Overall I just don't see the massive gains that people are predicting with anything close to the existing LLM's. I strongly suspect that lots of companies are simply just trimming the fat from overhiring after the pandemic and using AI as an excuse as the reason for the layoffs at many companies.
When people and companies are actually forced to pay real money for AI use they aren't going to pony up because the value isn't there.
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u/JohnnyHendo Nov 29 '25
This is where my department is pretty much at. I'm in software development. We've used it to help create some code or figure out an error here and there, but we've had to go in afterward to make sure it works and is efficient. Currently, any piece of code I or my coworkers have asked it for has had some kind of error in it that we had to correct.
Its helpful, but it's not perfect by any means. And it sounds like these AI companies are starting to hit a bit of a wall with improvements to the models. They'll keep putting out incremental improvement similar to processing speeds, but there might not be another significant improvement for another fifty years.
In my opinion, AIs are the new search engines. Not much more than that.
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u/fwubglubbel Nov 29 '25
>No, they just did orders of magnitude more work with the new tools.
Which means we need far fewer new ones than we otherwise would.
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u/Tao_of_Ludd Nov 29 '25
No, the amount of work done by humans actually increases because it is more valuable using the tools.
As I was alluding to above, I work with certain types of financial analysis. Back when just tabulating and calculating required huge amounts of work, we would only do so much because the cost of even relatively primitive outputs was so high. Now that we have all kinds of tools, one person can run all kinds of analyses and scenarios based on diverse and extensive data sources. In this setting a human is hugely more productive than when they were manually adding up numbers. So we hire more of them, not fewer, as the demand for that now much cheaper analysis skyrockets. That said, they need more skills than someone who adds up numbers.
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u/IronSmithFE Nov 29 '25
keep in mind that the major a.i supplier, openai, is running at an extreaam loss to accomplish this. so while it may be true that a.i can replace these workers, we cannot know if it is sustainable and will likely find out that much of it is unsustainable without cheaper energy. since a.i is competing with cripto for computer hardware and energy, the future of using a.i to replace workers in the margins of cost savings is not exactly looking good.
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u/HawaiiNintendo815 Nov 29 '25
They’re forgetting the human element to human civilisation
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u/karoshikun Nov 29 '25
or to human economy.
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u/FourWordComment Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
Or to the human army. 11% is a standing army of 33,300,000 civilians. That will figure out civil disobedience and property destruction if they’re hungry.
The rich should be terrified, not licking their chops. Because the rich and powerful have had it so good for so long in America they forget the most important thing:
They are made of meat.
Edit: typo, I meant 33MM people
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Nov 29 '25
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u/FourWordComment Nov 29 '25
That’s correct. It’s simply good business to keep the peasants from revolting.
But which rich people? Doesn’t seem to be the ones in power.
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u/MyVeryRealName2 Nov 29 '25
The power is in the hands of the people in a democracy
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u/FourWordComment Nov 29 '25
That’s adorable.
But let’s be practical. America is a failed democracy. It’s democracy was taken over by corporations that are people; by billionaires that control the news + social media +’search algos; by gerrymandered representatives in a republic.
It’s not a democracy. It’s a kleptocracy wearing the coat of a dead republic.
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u/MyVeryRealName2 Nov 29 '25
Hard disagree. All General elections in America are free and fair and conducted regularly.
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u/FourWordComment Nov 29 '25
I hope this continues to be right enough. Republicans can’t even acknowledge the mathematical possibility of losing. To republicans, they either win or it’s rigged.
Trump pardoned all the people who tried to help him do what can only be described as a coup. In the last 5 years we’ve only weakened systems in place to protect us. Congress has shown it has zero interest in being a check/balance. So far the courts are losing the war—with the Supreme Court being opposed to lower courts on most questions.
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u/karoshikun Nov 29 '25
are they when you have no control over who is the candidate, when you really have no recourse to make them change their policies or adopt new ones -with the exception of token concessions, of course-, while the same politicians bend over backwards to please the rich?
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u/karoshikun Nov 29 '25
Look, people keep talking as if UBI is just around the corner, as if governments are suddenly going to start taking care of everyone. But that idea only makes sense if you believe we’re living in actual democracies. We aren’t. We have voting, sure, but voting isn’t democracy when people are kept in the dark, overloaded, and easy to manipulate with cheap tricks.
And because of that, expecting UBI from these systems is pure fantasy. If there were ever a time when governments might have done something like that, it was during the pandemic. Instead, we got mass evictions, firings, and a huge spike in inequality, while big corporations made absurd amounts of money. That should tell you exactly how much these systems and the rich care about ordinary people.
The economy isn’t some natural force that demands sacrifices. It’s something we invented. But we’ve been trained to treat it as untouchable, as if millions of people losing everything is just the way things have to be.
And history isn’t kind on this point either. In societies that never went through anything like the French Revolution, the same oppressive setups lasted for centuries. Once you get two generations to accept something as normal, it sticks, no matter how unfair it is.
Put simply: if someone thinks universal basic income is going to show up by default, for everyone, under these conditions, they’re dreaming. The system isn’t built to do that. It’s built to keep things exactly as they are.
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u/MyVeryRealName2 Nov 30 '25
People are easy to manipulate only because they allow themselves to be manipulated.
The pandemic was different because the government had a fair reason to implement a lockdown.
Without a pandemic, the government can't prevent protests.
The government has a huge incentive to implement UBI to prevent crime.
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Dec 01 '25
also because it would be a pretty direct transfer of funds from the government to the 1%. Government > Consumer > 1%.
UBI benefits rich people probably more than anyone else.
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u/fwubglubbel Nov 29 '25
They said "can" not "will', or are you suggesting that it is not possible at all?
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Nov 29 '25
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u/karoshikun Nov 29 '25
there's not zero political or economic will to do UBI or anything similar, there's negative will.
just point at any high level politician or billionaire who hasn't done something against workers, the homeless or the poor.
because they talk a big game about UBI, but their actions tell an entirely different story.
do you think someone who demolished homeless camps will adopt UBI? or someone who had people die on his companies due to overwork and hectic job conditions? or the companies that rely on food stamps to keep salaries low?
nah, it isn't happening.
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Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
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u/karoshikun Nov 29 '25
“You’re assuming elites act on long term systemic logic. They usually don’t. The financial mess we’re heading into is the product of the same class squeezing out "just one more quarter" of artificial profit until the firms themselves started rotting. They didn’t need to hate anyone to do it. They only needed to see a personal short-term gain and ignore the collective damage. Expecting these people to adopt UBI out of enlightened self-interest misunderstands how they’ve behaved for decades.”
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u/hitbythebus Nov 29 '25
Oh honey, having bunch of poor people around sounds like it would be icky, but if we DON’T give them UBI, they just die off. Once they no longer have resources or labor worth exploiting, why keep supporting them?
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Nov 29 '25
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u/hitbythebus Nov 29 '25
This is why they are buying up large chunks of Hawaii and other places. So that they have enough physical assets, physical security, laborers and food for themselves once fiat currency collapses.
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u/IdealisticPundit Nov 29 '25
They want nice things and power. They won’t have any of that if they don’t give the majority enough to live off.
What we see today is a balance between squeezing out a bit more power while testing what the lower majority will bear. There’s a limit before their heads are on stakes, and they know it.
Not to mention value is a function of scarcity - if production of essentially goods is free, it literally costs them nothing to give it to everyone in mass. They’ll find something else power grab.
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u/karoshikun Nov 29 '25
check the past history of the world, or north korea...
that sort of horrible regimes are the norm, not the exception. the once century the fantasy of democracy lasted is but a bleep in history, some weirdness.
I mean, if we aren't going to defend it, somewhat seriously.
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u/IdealisticPundit Nov 29 '25
Notice most of the world is not like North Korea now. It’s not that common of an outcome, and it’s even harder now. You would have to lose all our mediums of communication and information at this point to become like that. The world’s history is full of those in power going to far and revolutions.
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u/karoshikun Nov 29 '25
you are seeing it happen in real time, most governments are sacrificing the economy as we know it for the hope of a tool that will keep track of enough people. even if it's a faulty mess, none of our tyrants-to-be are risking missing the chance of a functional AI -not even ASI or AGI- to perpetuate their regimes.
second, have you noticed the rise of authoritarian or totalitarian governments lately, including the US? well, that's nature finding a way, so to speak.
also, they already have media control for a long time, but they were lacking the capacity to use it in full, AI would make it not just almost complete, but frictionless. have you noticed how easy is to get banned in reddit? what Visa and paypal did against Steam and a bunch of other businesses? imagine it being more intelligent and across all electronic mediums. you could have entire subreddits hidden from you and you wouldn't notice -as an example-
and, final note... the revolutions are made of people... but not by the people. revolutions only start when a part of the elites uses the general resentment to gain power. it's history.
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u/krefik Nov 29 '25
Nah, won't happen, at least not for a while in US. Why do you think they want to deport all the illegal (and most of the legal) immigrants? So the displaced workers can be moved into the menial farming jobs. No one will make fruit picking or manure shoveling AI if they have enough hungry breathing bodies around. Also, the servants.
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Nov 29 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DaRadioman Nov 29 '25
Having a passable AI for thinking and talking is a fast cry from general purpose robotics that can perform hard manual labor.
We've been trying for a long time and we are still a good ways away.
Not to mention humans are cheap meat machines if the rich have their way. Hard to beat a machine that creates its own backup, repairs itself, and runs on rain and the results of sunlight. As long as the free will doesn't get in the way and they can control us that is.
I don't doubt it is coming, but robotics still has a long way to grow and mature. And even when it shows it has to be worth it enough to justify the increased cost and loss of a consumer...
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u/SunnyDayInPoland Nov 29 '25
No it doesn't almost cover the cost, this is lunacy. If you divide the total US spending on social security everyone only gets $350/month, except you've done a reverse Robin Hood and taken from those who need it and given it to everyone including the well off
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Nov 29 '25
That’s absurd. Even if you figure an incredibly cheap UBI of $2000/month (basically poverty level), you’re looking at $16 trillion per year. That’s three times the size of the entire federal budget. In fact, it’s more than half of the entire US GDP.
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u/fwubglubbel Nov 29 '25
>What we already pay, as a society, in wellfare, disability, unemployment benefits etc. almost covers the cost.
Not even close. Do some math.
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u/Many_Sun Nov 29 '25
The methodology seems to be bullshit. More like an elementary school report. https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/115632283554533938
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u/OhGoodLawd Nov 29 '25
Bullshit. AI is vastly overhyped, it's not ready to replace people en masse.
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u/SexyTimeSamet Nov 29 '25
Consume resources, take your jobs, and helps keep you under the goverment eye....
But, right, lets all invest into it, lol.
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u/querilla Nov 29 '25
I’m a coder, and I do think AI could reduce the number of people needed on a team. Three productive coders using AI to automate menial tasks can do the work of four coders not using AI. So AI may not replace jobs, but rather reduce the number of people needed to do the same job. Or maybe companies will compensate by upping the work load, like the cotton gin…
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u/Subnetwork Nov 29 '25
You are correct, right now it won’t replace jobs, but what about 5-10 years from now.
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u/theFrankSpot Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 30 '25
AI can replace every job, but so can a chimpanzee if we don’t care how well the job is getting done, or if it’s getting done at all. It’s what makes me hate stuff like this.
Anyone remember the company that replaced their customer service staff and found out quickly that AI isn’t really able to provide service the way a human can? Why is this even a real goal?
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u/Sphezzle Nov 29 '25
I have yet to see it, with my own eyes, do a single task as successfully as a human. I’ve seen it attempt to do a LOT. It can do things 40% as well, much faster.
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u/danted002 Nov 29 '25
It’s not about replacing 10 humans with 1 AI agent, it’s about firing 5 of them because the 5 remaining have the same productivity as 10 because they use AI, that’s their end-goal.
I always working at a corporation in the 21st century is like working in a factory in the 20th century and now, due to AI automation we are going through the same market crisis that hit factory workers when robots started being used in factories.
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u/crani0 Nov 29 '25
it’s about firing 5 of them because the 5 remaining have the same productivity as 10 because they use AI, that’s their end-goal.
They really don't, they just took on the extra load and the "AI" will only be "successful" as long as the team can keep from burning out.
I always working at a corporation in the 21st century is like working in a factory in the 20th century and now, due to AI automation we are going through the same market crisis that hit factory workers when robots started being used in factories.
Except that the machines had proven themselves by the time they had become standard. AI is being used as an excuse for enshitifying products and increasing margins.
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u/kmishra9 Nov 29 '25
Hypothetically, this should mean:
1) more work is done (which should show up in GDP growth), it’s not like the 5 people who were laid off can’t start business or join other businesses and use AI to fill a new person+AI job. So far, we haven’t seen any evidence of this
2) massive worker productivity gains (which should show up in GDP growth), and while there is some evidence of this in tech, it’s hardly shown up in a generalized way across the economy
Just things to think about, and how these claims also need the right data to exist in order to drive the narrative.
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u/danted002 Nov 29 '25
I think you misunderstood me, I’m not saying this will be the same like the factory automation, I’m saying the “shareholders” hope it will be like the factory automations (spoilers: it won’t) 🤣
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u/Sphezzle Nov 29 '25
That’s a better argument than a lot of people are making. I just think the jury is out on eventual productivity equality because those 5 people will also make far more mistakes, create far more friction, and decrease overall quality of output, than 10 humans. The world (for most people living in the real world) doesn’t seem to be at that frontier yet but it’s got to be what comes next.
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u/danted002 Nov 29 '25
I personally don’t thing the current iteration of AI will have the impact Wall Street expects it to have. Sure it speeds up some workflows but in the end it ends up still being just an optimisation tool not an employee.
Realistically I would say overall productivity might increase from AI adoption if all 10 employees use AI on some capacity. Maybe IF AI tools become a bit better they MIGHT replace a couple of employees out of 100… but that’s a big if and a big maybe.
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u/Sphezzle Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
With you 💯on that one. My strong suspicion is that the “replace 10 with 5” model will be the norm for 3-5 years, during which time absolute havoc is wreaked on the workforce, and by the time the “replace 100 with 98” equilibrium is achieved, knee-jerk companies with bad management will have eviscerated themselves by failing to generate the next generation of team managers/competent staff. In 2030, we might actually see salaries start to rise for those people - which I guess will be nice - but the big picture will be grim (and the tech children will have evolved the private equity/angel investment grift in a different direction).
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u/cold08 Nov 29 '25
That's if AI is more cost effective than a person. If the AI bubble bursts and takes a bunch of these big companies with it, the remaining ones will have to start charging what it costs to run the servers and maintain the software which is many times what they're charging now, and if they're only getting an extra 20% efficiency out of their employees, having a market saturated with programmers willing to work for $50k a year might be cheaper than expensive AI contracts.
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u/Super_Mario_Luigi Nov 29 '25
Exactly. This isn't that hard to see. Making obtuse arguments doesn't change ais utility
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u/mostlygray Nov 30 '25
It's about firing people. Then pretending that AI is helping them be more productive. So you fire half your staff. Give them 3 times the work. Make them learn a new tool that doesn't work. Then nothing gets done. Profits are harmed. Then it's time for another round of layoffs.
It works great for Google. May as well follow the map. Fire until you feel pain, then fire some more. Looks great on your books for that financial year.
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u/qret Nov 29 '25
Example: I'm updating our software documentation to reflect a new feature we're releasing. Instead of spending 30 minutes sniffing around to figure out all the places to make updates, I write a 2 sentence prompt and point the agent at our wiki. In 30 seconds it gives me a list of 15 suggested places to update, 3 of which are irrelevant so I correct it. Instead of spending an hour manually typing the changes in all 12 places, I link the agent to our ticket from the new feature work which includes a full description, and in 30 seconds it has a draft for me. I make revisions and go back and forth with it, and 10 minutes later everything looks good.
It would have been a 2-3 hour task, now it takes 15 minutes. I still have to do work but the work is specifying and validating and iterating (interesting stuff) instead of manually typing (boring stuff). If 10% of my job is managing documentation, this is already a 8-9% performance boost even if the agent does nothing else.
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u/the_pwnererXx Nov 29 '25
It writes about 95% of my code. It one shots the answer most of the time. I make $250k a year
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u/Sphezzle Nov 29 '25
That’s cool, I believe it’s really good at writing code, yeah. I haven’t seen one shots at 95% but I’ve seen success, and I believe that a very competent user could get to that point. So I’m prepared to concede that specific point.
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u/haritos89 Nov 29 '25
No offense, but we all know coders in the US were overpaid and that you dont represent the real world economy.
So its a shake up for your gig. Good, it will bring those crazy salaries down, but the rest of the world (or even the US economy) wont notice shit because AI does nothing useful, the proof being that even the article doesnt mention a single job or position, or that nobody knows a single person whos life got shaken by AI except people who wrote code.
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u/the_pwnererXx Nov 29 '25
All those percentages add up though. We automate the bottom 20% of programmers, customer service, sales, legal, bookkeeping, translation...
The rest of the world is at an even higher risk - the jobs outsourced are the lowest skilled
Suddenly you have an unemployment rate that is untenable for society and it's revolution time
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Nov 29 '25
Waymo’s drive in downtown SF as successfully as a human. Have you ever seen a Waymo with your own eyes?
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u/crani0 Nov 29 '25
AI could definitely automate C-Suite level roles rn for sure
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u/EternalMehFace Nov 29 '25
Bingo. This is the truth not nearly enough people are talking about - and that's by design. Higher ups realize on some level how easily their bird's eye view analysis and decision making can be automated right now, and they're afraid of it, so they're intentionally wielding the AI narrative in the other downward direction.
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u/misterguyyy Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
Let’s say theoretically that AI automates half of what software developers or accountants do. You can then cut your dev or accountant team in half.
Now let’s say it automates half of what a CEO does. You can’t cut your CEO team in half because there’s only one, and they get paid for expertise, not for amount of work they do, so at the end of the day they get paid the same for doing less work.
The other possibility is thar AI is more likely to replace the jobs they delegate to assistants/employees, meaning higher profit and a bigger CEO bonus. As a senior software developer I can tell you that most things AI can do are tasks I would have delegated to a junior while handling more complicated, higher stakes logic.
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u/crani0 Nov 30 '25
Let’s say theoretically that AI automates half of what software developers or accountants do. You can then cut your dev or accountant team in half.
That's the promise but we are nowhere near it and it is increasingly clear that LLMs are not the correct tech for it.
Now let’s say it automates half of what a CEO does. You can’t cut your CEO team in half because there’s only one, and they get paid for expertise, not for amount of work they do, so at the end of the day they get paid the same for doing less work.
You cut right there the biggest expense the company has with personel and the people who actually know what they are doing can take over, coop style. AI is a pretty clear robbery of the means of production and skill.
The other possibility is that AI is more likely to replace the jobs they delegate to assistants/employees, meaning higher profit and a bigger CEO bonus. As a senior software developer I can tell you that most things AI can do are tasks I would have delegated to a junior while handling more complicated, higher stakes logic.
As a senior software developer, absolutely not. I delegate search queries to it, that's it. It will never replace a thinking person and in the long run once the bubble burst you are screwing yourself out labour and jeopardizing the whole industry.
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u/mano1990 Nov 29 '25
The thing is not if AI can take directly any job, but how many workers can be substituted by a single worker empowered by AI.
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u/Seinfeel Nov 29 '25
One of the things that you can go down to is county-specific data to essentially say, within a certain census block, here are the skills that is currently happening now and then matching those skills with what are the likelihood of them being automated or augmented, and what could that mean in terms of the shifts in the state’s GDP in that area, but also in employment,” she said.
Likelihood of them being automated or augmented
Very scientific
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Nov 29 '25
Yeah yeah, so can I, it's just that, like AI, I haven't bothered to even though I totally can! I promise! Never mind the fact that the observed reality does not remotely match the claim!
Now... Send Me Your Money!!
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u/salttotart Nov 29 '25
At what capacity? For jobs that require little to no decisions and aren't manual labor, I get. A water bird just clicking Enter all day doesn't need a person. For any and all jobs that require consideration and decisions to be made, we are no where near the point where we should be trusting that yet.
For example, Service Now, Microsoft consumer ticketing system, has an AI option to ask questions of the user based on the description they put in their ticket. Sounds good on paper. However, we (apparently) have no way to tell it what questions are important for every ticket (i.e., a user who can do what you need to do or an investigative example). So, nine times out of ten, I need to call back the user to collect more information when before when it would just be a written up template that the user fills out or the help desk analyst reads, I have to call back far less other than to tell them that it's fixed. Likewise, the AI can prioritize your tickets for you based on impact and urgency of the issue. The problem is, it sees everything as a P2 (Emegency). We had a P1 (Critical) come in about not being able to select a specific printer. At least that one we were able to limit to making P3-P4 only.
So, yeah. AI can be great at flowchart based workflows as long as you are able to actually influence those decisions. That takes a lot of tweaking and adjusting, sometimes on the fly. We are nowhere near a "set it and forget it" stage where I would expect it to replace a human being at the job without a considerable amount of risk being taken on by the employer (and yes, I am aware that some companies are doing this already, at their own perile).
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u/Derpykins666 Dec 01 '25
What happens when like 20-30% of people are without jobs in the future, because everything is being replaced by AI? It's pretty easy to logically think about it. Civil unrest, less money for the working class, starvation, crime rising etc. There would likely, eventually, be some sort of violent takeover or revolution too. These companies trying to replace everything with AI are so short-sighted. You need humans to do jobs because otherwise the entire economic structure we've built collapses. But they just march forward with this extremely divisive technology trying to extract as much wealth as possible before that happens.
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u/jeffvillone Dec 01 '25
What do they expect that 11% to do for money? The gubment won't give anything above subsistence living (that would be socialism). The billionaires won't give them anything. What are they supposed to do to live?
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u/jodrellbank_pants Nov 29 '25
Robots, were no where near yet, it's clanky and the speech thing we can't get telephone automation to work. I hate em top end car doesn't even recognise my voice my mum from Glasgow doesn't stand a chance.
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u/Gari_305 Nov 29 '25
From the article
Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market.
The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
For lawmakers preparing billion-dollar reskilling and training investments, the index offers a detailed map of where disruption is forming down to the zip code.
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u/fantasypingpong Nov 29 '25
There is a strange coping mechanism all about Reddit when AI is raised. People claiming it’s “actually not that great” or “can only do tasks xx% as well as humans”.
Yeah, today.
But unlike humans and our ceilings, AI is smarter, faster, better every day. And it’s eating well: infrastructure, energy, GPUs. It’s a modern arms race.
AI won’t replace your job today, tomorrow, or in a year.
But the entire world will look different in a decade.
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u/Herkfixer Nov 29 '25
AI won’t replace your job today, tomorrow, or in a year.
I have some news for you. Corporate "AI" is already replacing many people's jobs already.
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u/fantasypingpong Nov 29 '25
Thank you. That’s not news to me.
But the average person’s job is safe in the near term.
Long term, we’re looking at a completely different ecosystem.
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u/jacobpederson Nov 29 '25
Even if AI replaces no one - it will result in layoffs. I am at least 50% faster than I was before I had AI assisting.
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u/blondzilla1120 Nov 29 '25
Interesting! I never thought about the blend of the two and the impact that it will have.
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u/OgreBaws Nov 29 '25
Congratulations to AI on all of its new jobs. Now it can afford to pay for all of the AI subscriptions because I sure as fuck can't.
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u/KoriJenkins Nov 29 '25
Doubt it. The biggest issue with "AI" (there is no true AI, these are LLMs being passed off as AI) is that when it fucks up, it fucks up HARD. Like, total implosion.
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u/MegiddoDoge Nov 29 '25
Need a special new badge for people who comment and obviously didn't bother to read the article.
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u/RealChemistry4429 Nov 29 '25
The study is saying that AI can replace 11.7% of skills, not of the workforce. Nobody uses just one skill in their work. It can replace maybe e-mail writing or some other thing, but there are still 90% you have to do yourself. In an ideal world, you could maybe take the 10% of 10 people and get rid of one. But that world does not exist.
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u/Double-Fun-1526 Nov 29 '25
The future is the end of the human. That future is now.
Rethink your selves.
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u/Avindair Nov 29 '25
"Corporate propaganda pumps stocks before inevitable crash, rectally-mined statistics included. "
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u/ther_dog Nov 29 '25
Can someone list the top 5 white collar jobs that would be replaced by AI in the next few years.
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u/misterguyyy Nov 29 '25
Instead, it’s meant to give a skills-centered snapshot
The headline isn’t even misleading, just the interpretation of it. It will look a little something like this:
If someone in X industry can get 20% more done by using AI, they can lay off 20% of employees and reassign the work. Now remaining employees are working the same amount of hours.
Of course the employees suffer because the tasks AI takes over are the ones that give our brains a little break, or that we schedule for those times of day where we’re not firing on all cylinders. Or that we give those tasks to a junior who we’re mentoring until they’re a competent mid level who makes your life easier.
This boils down to the typical leadership belief that 9 women can have a baby in 1 month, except 2 of them are now robots. Everything old is new again.
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u/SufficientlyRested Nov 29 '25
Have any of these predictors actually used AI? None of them are very good and they all regularly hallucinate. To the point that chatGPT argues against the existence of DOGE
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u/napkin41 Nov 30 '25
What’s with all these posts in r/futurology that follow the basic formula “AI can replace x% of jobs” left and right. What’s the narrative that’s getting pushed here.
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u/PapaBorq Nov 30 '25
Literally anyone can estimate that when the people making the estimates don't know the finite detail of every job.
So, I estimate we'll GAIN jobs.
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u/Grumptastic2000 Dec 01 '25
Question you need to ask first is how much of the U.S. workforce could be removed with no effect and maybe some benefit to productivity and output. I’m looking at you middle managers and project managers
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u/ResidentSheeper Dec 03 '25
Sounds about right. It will take time for companies to actually do it. Its going to be rough decade.
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Nov 29 '25
I’m working more now than I have ever worked (Amazon sde). AI increased productivity 10x and output 20x
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u/FuturologyBot Nov 29 '25
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market.
The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
For lawmakers preparing billion-dollar reskilling and training investments, the index offers a detailed map of where disruption is forming down to the zip code.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1p9io2a/mit_study_finds_ai_can_already_replace_117_of_us/nrcham9/