The future of work may already have a clone, and it lives inside a computer. A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the US labour market, putting about $1.2 trillion in wages at risk.
And unlike past fears focused mostly on tech workers, researchers say this wave of disruption is spreading across finance, health care and professional services too.
‘Digital twins’ in making
The study is powered by a tool called the Iceberg Index, built by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It uses large-scale simulations to model how 151 million U.S. workers perform their tasks and how AI might step in to take over.
The tool maps more than 32,000 skills across 923 different occupations in 3,000 counties, showing exactly which skills AI systems can already handle.
It runs on the Frontier supercomputer in Tennessee, which allows researchers to experiment with future job changes long before they appear in real life.
“Basically, we are creating a digital twin for the US labour market,” said Prasanna Balaprakash, a director at ORNL who co-led the project to CNBC.
The real danger is not tech layoffs
Researchers describe current layoffs in tech and computing roles as only the tip of the iceberg. That visible portion represents just 2.2% of exposed wages — roughly $211 billion ( $1.2 trillion dollars).
The much larger, mostly unseen part of the iceberg is the everyday jobs AI is already capable of performing. Routine work in human resources, office administration, logistics and finance holds far more exposure than most people expect.
These roles do not make headlines, but they make up a giant share of the wage risk lurking below the waterline.
The Iceberg Index is not meant to predict the exact moment jobs disappear. Instead, it gives a clearer picture of what today’s AI can do now and how quickly workplaces might change.
Policymakers can use it to explore what-if scenarios before they spend public money on retraining programs.
Several states are already using it. Tennessee was the first to claim the index in its new AI Workforce Action Plan. North Carolina and Utah are preparing their own statewide strategies based on the simulations.
One of the most surprising findings is that AI disruption is not limited to tech hubs like California or New York. It is spread across all 50 states, including rural regions that are rarely included in the AI conversation.
To help these communities prepare, the Iceberg team created an interactive system that lets states test how changes in training programmes or technology adoption might reshape local employment and economic growth.
Work’s future has a clone
The study paints a future where every worker has a digital counterpart a “twin” that shows how easily their tasks could be automated. Whether that future becomes a threat or an opportunity depends on the action taken today.
AI might not replace entire jobs overnight. But it is already replacing pieces of them and those pieces are starting to add up.