Brian Eastwood | MIT Sloan – Ideas Made to Matter | June 10, 2025
What impact will AI and emerging technologies have on the U.S. labor force? Since the arrival of ChatGPT a little less than three years ago, such debates have typically fallen into one of two categories: ways AI can augment the workforce and ways AI-driven automation will disrupt the workforce.
A new paper from MIT Sloan postdoctoral associate Isabella Loaiza and professor Roberto Rigobon takes a different approach, asking ,“What human capabilities complement AI’s shortcomings?”
The approach shifts the discussion from disruption and labor substitution toward human abilities. “In the future-of-work field, the focus is often on machines and not humans,” Loaiza said. “We wanted to focus on what humans can do. We don’t want to instill fear in people’s hearts. We wanted to show how AI is going to complement workers.”
To answer their question, the researchers developed a framework of human-intensive capabilities that gave rise to three key metrics:
- A risk-of-substitution score
- A potential-for-augmentation score
- A score that indicates whether a task relies on certain human capabilities that AI lacks, among them ethics, creativity, and emotional intelligence.
The pair then applied each of these metrics to all U.S. tasks and occupations identified by O*NET, a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics database of occupational information that defines 19,000 tasks across approximately 950 types of jobs.
Their conclusion? Work that is dependent on human characteristics such as empathy, judgment, and hope is less likely to be replaced by machines.
