Posted on 11/28/2025 7:44:39 PM PST by SeekAndFind
A new labor market analysis from Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that artificial intelligence is no longer a future threat to jobs. It is already capable of performing tasks tied to 11.7 percent of total U.S. wages. That represents as much as $1.2 trillion in economic exposure across major sectors including finance, health care, logistics and professional services.
The findings come from a newly developed labor simulation system known as the Iceberg Index. The project was built jointly by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and models how today’s AI tools interact with the real American workforce at a granular, national scale.
Rather than forecasting distant predictions, the Iceberg Index estimates what current AI systems can already do right now and how those capabilities overlap with existing human jobs.
The Iceberg Index models all 151 million U.S. workers as individual digital agents. Each worker is tagged with detailed information including skills, job tasks, location and occupation. The system tracks more than 32,000 distinct skills across 923 occupations in over 3,000 U.S. counties.
By mapping today’s AI capabilities onto that massive skills database, researchers can measure what portion of existing labor tasks can already be handled by automation or augmented by AI tools.
“Basically, we are creating a digital twin for the U.S. labor market,” said Prasanna Balaprakash, ORNL director and co leader of the research. “The index runs population-level experiments, revealing how AI reshapes tasks, skills and labor flows long before those changes show up in the real economy.”
This approach allows researchers and policymakers to see beneath the visible surface of AI disruption, where layoffs and job shifts make headlines, and quantify the deeper exposure that is building quietly across white collar and administrative roles.
The study found that only about 2.2 percent of total wage exposure, or roughly $211 billion, sits in obvious technology fields such as software development, computing and IT services. That is the visible tip of the iceberg that dominates public discussion.
The remaining exposure, representing nearly $1.2 trillion in wages, lies in areas that are not typically viewed as automation targets. This includes routine operations in:
These functions often involve structured tasks that modern AI systems already perform with increasing reliability, even when the surrounding job title sounds resistant to automation.
This distribution challenges the long held belief that AI risk will be concentrated only in coastal technology hubs or Silicon Valley style occupations.
The researchers emphasize that the Iceberg Index is not a prediction engine for when specific layoffs will occur. Instead, it provides a real time snapshot of what existing AI can already do from a skills perspective. That allows governments to test policy decisions before committing billions of dollars to workforce development programs.
“The index is meant to give policymakers a structured way to explore what-if scenarios before they commit real money and legislation,” the research team explained in its release.
To validate the model using real world data, researchers partnered with multiple state governments. Tennessee, North Carolina and Utah all supplied labor data and began using the platform to explore how AI could reshape their local economies under different adoption and training scenarios.
Tennessee became the first state to formalize Iceberg into public policy. The state cited the Index directly in its newly released AI Workforce Action Plan. Utah officials are preparing a similar policy report based on Iceberg modeling.
North Carolina state senator DeAndrea Salvador, who worked closely with MIT on the project, said the most valuable feature of the tool is how deeply it drills into local labor markets.
“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.
Salvador noted that this kind of modeling is especially helpful as states launch overlapping AI task forces, workforce boards and economic development initiatives. The simulations give decision makers a data-driven way to coordinate policies instead of guessing where exposure might emerge.
One of the most striking conclusions of the Iceberg Index is how evenly AI exposure is distributed across the country. The simulations show that at risk occupations appear in all 50 states, including many rural and inland regions that are often excluded from national AI discussions.
This geographic dispersion has major implications for local economies. Regions that rely on administrative services, logistics hubs, health care networks and financial back offices could feel pressure just as strongly as major metro tech centers.
To help governments respond strategically, the Iceberg team built an interactive simulation environment that lets officials test different policy levers. These include:
“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 states.
Balaprakash also serves on the Tennessee Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council and has shared state-specific findings directly with the governor’s office and the state’s AI director.
He said many of Tennessee’s core industries such as health care, nuclear energy, manufacturing and transportation still require substantial physical labor. That provides some insulation from purely digital automation in the near term.
However, he cautioned that robotics, AI assistants and advanced software will increasingly reshape how those physical industries operate. The strategic question for states is how to deploy technology in a way that strengthens productivity rather than hollowing out employment.
For American workers, the study signals that AI disruption will not be confined to futuristic technology roles. Routine cognitive tasks embedded inside ordinary office jobs are already within the reach of modern systems. That raises the importance of reskilling, continual education and hybrid human-AI workflows.
For employers, the findings suggest that productivity gains from AI are already accessible across a wide range of industries. Companies that delay adoption may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage, while those that deploy AI without thoughtful workforce strategies risk damaging morale and institutional knowledge.
For investors, the Iceberg Index reinforces why AI infrastructure, software platforms, semiconductor providers, robotics companies and enterprise automation vendors remain central to long term economic growth. At the same time, the data underscores why investors must carefully evaluate which business models face margin pressure as automation spreads.
The Iceberg team is positioning the platform not as a finished product but as a long term planning sandbox that states and industries can continuously update as technology evolves.
“It is really aimed towards getting in and starting to try out different scenarios,” Salvador said.
As AI capabilities continue to accelerate, tools like the Iceberg Index may become essential for workforce planning at every level of government. The technology is no longer speculative. The economic exposure is already measurable, widespread and growing.
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
But how well can it do it? I still see a lot of errors.
As referenced in a Star Trek movie, the workers losing their jobs to machines once threw their wooden shoes, the sabots, into the mechanisms and coined the word “sabotage.” French word “saboter” for “bungle, botch, wreck or sabotage”.
Today the energy glutton AI would have to be starved of power by someone.
I’m just talking. No plans. Just chin music.
I calculated it could already do 11.8% of U.S. work. MIT is wrong. Or, as the editors of Ergo would have said, they're lying.
Very well (gathering information given a good model, producing something) and poorly (substituting for real observation and operating without human oversight).
Those looking to replace people will fail hard. Those looking to enhance their staff will kick tail.
“I calculated it could already do 11.8% of U.S. work. MIT is wrong.”
They’ll just say + or -.
wy69
If true, 11.7% is not that significant (at this point)
It is when you realize that eight years ago AI could do zero percent of the work (e.g. it is growing at an exponential rate, not linearly).
Just wait until AI can design itself. And when it can design robots to repair anything. Including other robots.
That was my second favorite Star Trek movie. Had everything that makes a good movie.
| I don't buy into new technology "buzzwords" because they have been part of the computing/communications hype. Why do we capitalize the world "Internet", but not capitalize "telecom network"? They are more less the same thing. "AI" is merely a continuation of the same trend to draw knowledge from global networks and internet user patterns monitored by tech giants. There's no doubt: advanced comms/computer technology has vastly changed the economies of 1st world countries, as workers are forced to migrate to more useful work, considering the jobs that are no longer needed due to automation. The future will bring more change and realignment. |
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.