OpenAI's popular chatbot, ChatGPT, has been used to perform multiple tasks since its launch last November. This includes writing, helping students copy, and making children's books. Powerful chatbots with the fastest-growing user base are expected to displace many jobs. According to Business Insider, once a chatbot is interviewed by a company, Google can hire it at an entry-level level of code. Amazon employees who tested ChatGPT also spoke highly of the chatbot.

A handful of superstar U.S. metro areas are leading the way in AI, while much of the rest of the country is at risk of being left behind. Why it matters: AI can enhance productivity and growth in multiple sectors, but as a technology that tends to centralize around a handful of talent hubs, it could also increase regional economic disparity across the country. What's happening: In a new report released today, researchers at the Brookings Institution assessed the geographic distribution of AI talent, investment and research around the U.S. The other side: More than half of the 261 U.S. metro areas surveyed by Brookings exhibit no significant AI activities at all. What they're saying: "AI is at the stage where it is highly dependent on a super-specific talent base, and there's also a heavy need for massive computing power," says Mark Muro, policy director at Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program and a co-author of the report. What to watch: Muro notes that many of the AI early adopters benefited from federal investments in R&D that could potentially be spread more evenly around the country.

A new study warns that the American AI industry is highly concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area and that this could prove to be a weakness in the long run. The Bay leads all other regions of the country in AI research and investment activity, accounting for about one-quarter of AI conference papers, patents, and companies in the US. Bay Area metro areas see levels of AI activity four times higher than other top cities for AI development. "When you have a high percentage of all AI activity in Bay Area metros, you may be overconcentrating, losing diversity, and getting groupthink in the algorithmic economy. It locks in a winner-take-most dimension to this sector, and that's where we hope that federal policy will begin to invest in new and different AI clusters in new and different places to provide a balance or counter," Mark Muro, policy director at the Brookings Institution and the study's coauthor, told WIRED.

The most vulnerable occupations include marketing specialists, financial advisers and computer programmers--jobs that tend to pay high wages and skew toward male, white and Asian workers, a recent study from the Brookings Institution found. Other jobs most vulnerable to being affected by AI included certain types of engineers, optometrists, graphic designers, software developers and sales managers. New technology in the workplace has generally been better for higher-skilled workers than for the lower-skilled, said Mark Muro, one of the study's authors. "Artificial intelligence could play out just the opposite." While machines have long been able to perform repetitive physical tasks or complex mathematical calculations, AI enables computers to analyze data, predict outcomes, learn from experience by recognizing patterns and make decisions.

Last November, Brookings published a report on artificial intelligence's impact on the workplace that immediately raised eyebrows. Many readers, journalists, and even experts were perplexed by the report's primary finding: that, for the most part, it is better-paid, better-educated white-collar workers who are most exposed to AI's potential economic disruption. This conclusion--by authors Mark Muro, Robert Maxim, and Jacob Whiton--seemed to fly in the face of the popular understanding of technology's future effects on workers. For years, we've been hearing about how these advancements will force mainly blue-collar, lower-income workers out of jobs, as robotics and technology slowly consume those industries. In an article about the November report, The Mercury News outlined this discrepancy: "The study released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution seems to contradict findings from previous studies--including Brookings' own--that showed lower-skilled workers will be most affected by robots and automation, which can involve AI."

The encroachment of automation and robotics into the workplace has forced us to rethink the way that certain jobs are done, and it has produced anxiety about whether there will be enough jobs in the future for the human workers who need them. So far, much of the attention has focussed on blue-collar work, as factory assembly lines and warehouses have adopted automated processes more quickly and visibly than other industries. Automation on a factory floor evokes a simple image: robotic arms assembling parts into Tesla cars; mobile robots driving pallets of goods through Amazon distribution centers. In either scenario, the impact on human workers is easy to see. What is harder to visualize is how similar technology might find its way into the aspects of human labor that are invisible and not as easily routinized, such as complex decision-making, strategic planning, and creative thought.

Robots might be taking over the blue-collar jobs of less-educated Americans, but artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to shake up college-educated employees in higher paying jobs, leaving no worker immune to the impact of technology on the American workforce. "[AI] will be used more extensively by the most high-paid and many of the best-educated workers," says Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. "Automation has usually tended to affect lower-pay workers. AI is going to be highly prevalent in the middle class, white collar office. It was surprising to see how clearly that jumped out."

Anyone who frequents fast-food restaurants will sooner or later run across a kiosk designed to replace a cashier. And on factory floors across the nation, robots are increasingly doing tasks once handled by humans. Artificial intelligence, which uses computers to handle mental tasks, could prove just as disruptive for white-collar workers in the years ahead, according to a new study from the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. High-tech hubs like Boulder, and to a lesser degree metro Denver, are vulnerable economically to the changes coming from the widespread adoption of AI expected in the years ahead. "Well-paid, well-educated professionals are not immune from the disruptions of emerging technologies," said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings.

As the advancement of technology continues to rise, so do concerns about automation soon taking our jobs. Recent data from McKinsey & Company projects that up to 800 million global workers could be replaced by robots by 2030. For the most part, the report found that blue collar jobs, such as machine operating and fast food preparing, are especially susceptible to disruption. But a new study published by the Brookings Institution says that might not be the case. The report takes a closer look at jobs that are the most exposed to artificial intelligence (AI), a subset of automation where machines learn to use judgment and logic to complete tasks -- and to what degree.

Lots of math, science, technology and business roles involve, say, operating a power plant to maximize energy efficiency, or running an ad campaign to minimize cost per click,