Much ink has already been spilled about the threat of AI to various labor markets. As new forms of automation seep into industries, folks want to know which jobs are endangered and which are safe. Well, a new study published by Microsoft researchers purports to show which positions have the most AI “applicability,” and which do not. From the research, you might assume you could predict which careers have longevity and which may soon go the way of the Dodo—although the report itself denies that this is necessarily the case.
Microsoft’s study was compiled by analyzing queries entered into its search engine chatbot, Bing Copilot. The goal of the research was to analyze “what work activities users are seeking AI assistance with, what activities the AI performs, and what this means about occupations,” the report states.
From its research, Microsoft developed what it calls an “AI applicability score,” which measures whether a particular vocation can productively apply AI in its activities or not. The score “allows us to track the frontier of AI’s relevance to work,” researchers write. Frequently, in jobs where AI ranks relatively high in terms of applicability, the technology “often acts in a service role to the human as a coach, advisor, or teacher that gathers information and explains it to the user,” the report claims. “We find the highest AI applicability scores for knowledge work occupation groups such as computer and mathematical, and office and administrative support, as well as occupations such as sales whose work activities involve providing and communicating information,” it continues.
The 40 occupations with the highest AI “applicability” score are as follows:
As you can see, most of the jobs here are so-called “knowledge economy” jobs—careers that involve learning about, analyzing, and communicating specialized information. On the other hand, the jobs that don’t have much AI applicability are decidedly more blue-collar. They are as follows:
As you can see, my job (writer) scores relatively high on the scale of positions that could be exposed to automation. On the other hand, job categories such as “dishwasher,” “cement mason,” “gas pumping station operator,” “floor sander,” “motorboat operator,” “hazardous waste removal worker,” and “embalmer,” all rank relatively low on that same scale. One would think that you wouldn’t need to do a whole study to come to these conclusions, but here we are.
Microsoft’s study claims that there isn’t necessarily a positive correlation between activities that AI can do and jobs that will soon find themselves on the chopping block. It states: “It is tempting to conclude that occupations that have high overlap with activities AI performs will be automated and thus experience job or wage loss, and that occupations with activities AI assists with will be augmented and raise wages,” the report states. “This would be a mistake, as our data do not include the downstream business impacts of new technology, which are very hard to predict and often counterintuitive.”
It makes sense that Microsoft would want to downplay the disruptive potential of its new technology. Yet if recent history is to be considered (i.e. layoffs in industries where AI has seen inroads—like coding), it may not actually be all that difficult to predict how things will pan out, at least in the short term. We’ll probably see a lot of embarrassing efforts to fire people and hire AI being reversed before the god-machine ever graces us with its presence.
So, if you’ve always dreamed of making a living by dipping corpses in preservative liquid in preparation for their journey into the afterlife, good news! You will probably be able to have a career that is relatively unperturbed by AI, and there’s very little chance that a chatbot (or robot) will take job opportunities away from you. If, on the other hand, you aspire to a lot in life that doesn’t involve cleaning plates, felling trees, disposing of plutonium, or consorting with dead bodies, there may be little hope for you.