arXiv:2608.05172cs.CYcs.AI2026-08

提出更准确的任务耗时估算方法,揭示AI对不同职业的真实影响差异。

Estimating time spent on work tasks

论文配图:Estimating time spent on work tasks
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于任务频率与单次耗时,构建可解释的耗时估算模型
  • 发现按时间加权后高技能岗位暴露于AI的风险显著上升
  • 为劳动力市场研究提供可复用的时间权重基准

经济学中的任务型框架将职业视为一系列任务的集合,是理解技术如何影响工作的标准视角:新技术改变每项任务的成本或耗时,这些任务层面的影响聚合为职业层面的影响。本文研究任务在聚合中的权重应如何设定。以往研究多采用随意或缺乏依据的任务权重。尽管近期建议以时间占比作为权重,但现有时间数据要么来自不适用于此目的的粗粒度ONET数据,要么通过黑箱语言模型估算。本文提出一种合理方法,估算近18,000项构成美国几乎所有职业的任务的耗时比例。我们的估计结合了(i)来自ONET的任务预期发生频率,以及(ii)单次任务完成所需时间。后者通过语言模型提供的成对比较构建约束满足问题求解。我们通过分析约束解空间并收集多个职业劳动者数据验证了估计结果。将该时间权重应用于分析美国职业受AI影响的程度,发现部分先前结果对时间权重敏感。考虑工作时间占比而非任务数量占比,使最低与最高暴露岗位之间的差距扩大:多数职业的暴露程度被下调,而最暴露岗位则显著上升。重新加权后,25个常被认为最受AI影响的职业中,有11个发生重排,顶尖名单从文书类工作转向分析类角色。时间份额可作为劳动经济与技术经济学研究及政策制定的一般基础工具。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The task-based framework in economics models occupations as bundles of tasks. It is the standard lens for understanding how technology affects work: a new technology changes the cost or time each task requires and these task-level effects aggregate to occupation-level effects. We study how tasks should be weighted in this aggregation. Prior work has relied on idiosyncratic or ill-justified choices for task weights. While recent work suggests weighting tasks by time spent, existing time shares are either based on coarse ONET data not intended for this purpose or estimated via black-box language models. We address this gap by proposing a principled method for estimating time shares for nearly 18,000 tasks that constitute nearly all U.S. jobs. Our estimates factor a task's time into (i) the expected frequency of the task, derived from ONET, and (ii) the time to complete a single instance of it. To estimate the latter, we solve a constraint satisfaction problem based on pairwise comparisons elicited from language models about which tasks are longer per instance. We validate our estimates by characterizing the solution space of the constraint satisfaction problem and collecting data from workers for multiple occupations. We apply our time shares to analyze how AI exposes U.S. occupations and find that some prior results are sensitive to time weights. Accounting for the share of working time exposed to AI, rather than the share of tasks like prior work, widens the gap between the least and most exposed jobs: it lowers measured exposure for most occupations but raises it for the most exposed. Re-weighting by time also reshuffles 11 of the 25 occupations widely reported as most exposed to AI, shifting the top of the list away from clerical work and toward analytical roles. Time shares can serve as a general primitive for research and policy on the labor economy and the economics of technology.

任务建模劳动力经济人工智能影响时间估算

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