Many people are already fearful for their jobs following the rapid acceleration of AI, yet one new study estimates that around 11.7 percent of the current workforce in the United States could see their roles made redundant by the new technology.
Millions of people across the world have already seen artificial intelligence impact their jobs, with their responsibilities outsourced to the new technology or their roles made completely redundant by companies looking to cut costs.
Most of the globe's richest individuals see a future where only a handful of jobs survive the AI revolution – with some even putting their own roles in the firing line – and a new study has suggested that it could happen sooner than we think.
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As reported by CNBC, research conducted by experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have revealed that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7 percent of the labor market in the United States alone, using a complex labor simulation tool to work this out.
It's hard to work out an exact figure but the study estimates that there around around 151 million employed individuals in America right now, so that would mean around 17,667,000 jobs could be wiped out immediately.
It wouldn't necessarily be jobs affecting specific groups of people either, as everything from translators to coding staff at some of the country's highest-earning companies could see themselves on the chopping block, and its certainly a worrying prospect.
The study estimates that the total 'wage exposure', as in the amount of money that would be lost across a year if these roles were eliminated, to be at around $1.2 trillion, with human resources, logistics, finance, and office administration among the most affected.
It's not necessarily meant to predict when these roles will be eliminated, but instead that there exists AI tech that is capable of replacing humans in these positions, providing detailed information to policymakers to provide answers and solutions before the problem occurs.
"Project Iceberg enables policymakers and business leaders to identify exposure hotspots, prioritize training and infrastructure investments, and test interventions before committing billions to implementation," the report reads.
This offers a stark contrast to what many AI experts projecting job losses have expressed so far, as many simply see a world with nobody needing to work as utopian, without offering the means to actually support individuals that have lost their jobs outside of certain schemes that appear a little too good to be true.
"I have still not heard a realistic explanation about how our economy is going to function with increasingly fewer consumers with jobs," writes one comment on a Reddit thread discussing the new study. "Moreover, these jobs getting replaced with AI are likely to be jobs that are probably going to be white collar and paying into the top 10% of earners.
"I just don't see how capitalism doesn't collapse on itself when 98% of the high-paying jobs have been automated."