IT Home News on October 8: Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman posted a tweet on the X platform on October 6, citing a prediction by Nobel Prize in Economics winner Daron Acemoglu, stating thatOnly about 5% of human jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence within the next 10 years.
IT Home reviewed public information and found that Acemoglu is one of the most influential economists of our time, whose main research areas include political economy, economic development, institutions, technological change, and income inequality.
"He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2024 together with Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, "for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity."
The reposted article was published in the 7th month of this year in the inaugural issue of The Humanist Review. Acemoglu estimates that, technically, AI could automate about 20% of jobs,but constrained by the pace of enterprise adoption, the actual automation rate will be only about 5% within 10 years.He admits this figure is "admittedly just an estimate."
Acemoglu points out that current AI models perform outstandingly in lab settings such as writing code and radiological diagnosis, but enterprises see inferior results when deploying similar tools in real-world environments. Engineers spend a great deal of time debugging AI-generated code, and doctors struggle to effectively combine their expertise with AI tools, causing results to fall short of expectations. Models are improving faster than the maturity of the tools available to enterprises.
In February this year, Suleyman told the Financial Times that "most tasks" of white-collar jobs such as lawyers, accountants, and project managers would be automated within 12 to 18 months. In June, he clarified on a podcast that he meant "tasks" rather than "jobs"—AI merely makes work get done faster, not meaning positions will disappear.