Human workers are not in imminent danger of being usurped by artificial intelligence (AI), a new study reported.

Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL), the MIT Sloan School of Management, The Productivity Institute, and IBM’s Institute for Business Value examined the economic practicality of using AI for automating tasks in the workplace, with a specific emphasis on computer vision. 

“Our study on automation with AI computer vision systems does deliver some encouraging news about job replacement, showing that many tasks wouldn’t be economically attractive to automate for years or even decades,” Neil Thompson, principal investigator at MIT CSAIL and the Initiative on the Digital Economy, told CNBC Make It.

Their findings show that, currently, it is economically sensible to replace human labor with AI in only about one-fourth of the jobs where vision is a key component of the work.

Specifically, the study's abstract stated that, "at today’s costs U.S. businesses would choose not to automate most vision tasks that have 'AI Exposure,' and that only 23% of worker wages being paid for vision tasks would be attractive to automate. This slower roll-out of AI can be accelerated if costs falls rapidly or if it is deployed via AI-as-a-service platforms that have greater scale than individual firms, both of which we quantify. Overall, our findings suggest that AI job displacement will be substantial, but also gradual—and therefore there is room for policy and retraining to mitigate unemployment impacts."

“This indicates a more gradual integration of AI into various sectors, contrasting with the often hypothesized rapid AI-driven job displacement,” said Thompson, in an MIT news story. “We placed our focus on the field of computer vision, an area where cost modeling has seen significant advancements.”

That gradual integration means that there will not be a rapid replacement of human workers with AI bots, Thompson also told CNBC Make It. But, he said, “Even in the short run, there will be workers whose jobs are lost or whose responsibilities get changed because of AI.”

While AI technology is still considered to be in the beginning stages of its development, that development will cost less in the future, which may affect how quickly companies opt to use them, CNBC reported. But Thompson said that it will likely take many years for those costs to decrease to a level where these AI systems can be deployed by companies on a broad level.

“The stuff that we’re seeing now is very exciting and wonderful, but I think it’s worth always putting it in context of this technology that, at least for the next five or 10 years, will be on a very steep improvement curve,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bill Gates on Gates’s “Unconfuse Me” podcast. “These are the stupidest the models will ever be.”