Sử gia có thật sự bị AI thay thế? Nghiên cứu của Microsoft bị giới chuyên môn phản bác

• Microsoft công bố nghiên cứu về “tác động nghề nghiệp của AI tạo sinh”, phân tích 200.000 lượt tương tác trên Bing Copilot và đối chiếu với cơ sở dữ liệu nghề O*NET.

• Kết quả: sử gia đứng thứ 2 trong danh sách nghề dễ bị AI thay thế, với 91% công việc có thể trùng lặp với khả năng AI. Nghề duy nhất có điểm số cao hơn là phiên dịch viên.

• Danh sách 10 nghề rủi ro cao gồm: phiên dịch viên và biên dịch viên, sử gia, tiếp viên hành khách, nhân viên kinh doanh dịch vụ, nhà văn và tác giả, nhân viên dịch vụ khách hàng, lập trình viên máy công cụ CNC, tổng đài viên điện thoại, nhân viên bán vé và nhân viên du lịch, cùng phát thanh viên và DJ radio.

• Danh sách các nghề ít bị AI ảnh hưởng gồm: thợ vận hành máy nạo vét, nhân viên vận hành cầu và cửa âu tàu, nhân viên vận hành nhà máy xử lý nước, thợ làm khuôn và lõi đúc, cùng thợ vận hành thiết bị khai thác gỗ.... với điểm số phơi nhiễm gần 0%.

• Sarah Weicksel, Giám đốc Hiệp hội Lịch sử Hoa Kỳ, phản bác kết quả: “Đó là sự hiểu lầm cơ bản về công việc của sử gia. AI không thể thay thế chuyên môn và năng lực đặt sự kiện trong bối cảnh lịch sử.”

• Microsoft khẳng định nghiên cứu không có nghĩa AI sẽ “thay thế” hoàn toàn công việc, chỉ phản ánh mức độ trùng lặp tác vụ.

• Dữ liệu thị trường lao động: sinh viên ngành lịch sử có tỷ lệ thất nghiệp 4,6%, thấp hơn ngành khoa học máy tính 6,1%. Điều này cho thấy giá trị của chuyên môn nhân văn.

• Sử gia vẫn tìm được việc ở nhiều lĩnh vực: từ Quốc hội, Cơ quan An ninh Quốc gia đến công ty sản xuất búp bê American Girl.

• Hiệp hội Lịch sử Hoa Kỳ đã đưa ra hướng dẫn sử dụng AI trong giảng dạy và nghiên cứu, coi AI là công cụ hỗ trợ, không phải mối đe dọa.

• Nghiên cứu cũng nhắc lại trường hợp máy ATM: dù từng được cho là thay thế nhân viên ngân hàng, nhưng thực tế ban đầu lại làm tăng số lượng việc làm.

📌 AI có thể thay đổi cách sử gia làm việc, nhưng khó thay thế hoàn toàn. Microsoft xác định 91% tác vụ của sử gia có thể bị AI hỗ trợ, song lịch sử cho thấy công nghệ thường tạo thêm cơ hội mới. Với tỷ lệ thất nghiệp 4,6% và triển vọng nghề “tươi sáng”, ngành lịch sử chứng minh rằng chuyên môn phân tích và bối cảnh con người vẫn là giá trị không thể sao chép bởi AI.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/08/24/ai-job-replacement-historians/

Will historians really be replaced by AI? They remain skeptical.
A recent Microsoft study sent shockwaves with its rankings of threatened jobs. But some historians dismiss the idea, offering lessons for others.
August 25, 2025 at 6:05 a.m. EDT13 minutes ago
6 min

Summary

Books seen falling apart into pixels.
(Illustration by The Washington Post; iStock)

By Todd C. Frankel
There it was, right there at No. 2 on the list of jobs most at risk of being replaced by AI: Historian.
Sarah Weicksel — a former Smithsonian Institution historian who now heads the American Historical Association — first heard about the list during an industry conference in California. “Did you see we’re all getting replaced by AI?” someone asked her. It was said tongue-in-cheek, but the comment contained a twinge of worry.
Researchers at Microsoft had compared how people use artificial intelligence against the tasks that make up hundreds of jobs, publishing a list of the 40 jobs that overlapped the most with AI queries and the 40 that overlapped the least. The recently unveiled study of “the occupational implications of generative AI” slotted historians behind only “Interpreters and Translators” as the jobs with “highest AI applicability score.” For historians, 91 percent of their work activities were covered to some degree by AI queries.
“That’s absurd,” Weicksel said. “It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what historian do and who historians are.”
Talk of AI’s job-killing powers has reached a feverish pitch this summer. Corporate leaders brag about it. AI companies tout their technology’s supposed power to make white-collar jobs disappear. Just about everyone seems concerned about how to AI-proof their careers.
Microsoft said its study is not necessarily definitive. “Our data do not suggest that AI will replace these jobs or even that chatbots can fully perform any single occupation,” Kiran Tomlinson of Microsoft Research said in a statement, adding that “large language models aren’t always suited for every task a job entails, including many of those done by historians.”
Still, the study spurred news articles and social media posts with bombastic titles such as “Are there any AI-safe jobs left?” It joins other recent studies coalescing around the idea that the fattest targets for AI are going to be the laptop jockeys of the information world, including computer coders and writers of all stripes. And, now, historians.
Amid the AI hype, experts have been scouring employment data for signs of AI’s impact, with little evidence so far one way or another, said Matthew Martin, senior U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.
“The fear is that AI is going to taking everyone’s job,” Martin said. “It’s a little early to say that.”
But some historians are skeptical that AI is coming for them, a view informed by their professional expertise and because they’ve heard this sort of thing before. Their view also might offer hope to other professions predicted to be overtaken by AI.
Top 10 jobs most at risk from AI
Table with 1 columns and 10 rows. (column headers with buttons are sortable)
Job title and AI applicability score
Interpreters and Translators 49%
Historians 48%
Passenger Attendants 47%
Sales Representatives of Services 46%
Writers and Authors 45%
Customer Service Representatives 44%
CNC Tool Programmers 44%
Telephone Operators 42%
Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks 41%
Broadcast Announcers and Radio DJs 41%
Source: Microsoft Research
The college history major has been dealing with doubts about its utility for decades, like so many humanities degrees. Even back in the late ’60s, California Gov. Ronald Reagan (R) questioned the wisdom of “subsidizing intellectual curiosity” rather than investing in practical degrees. Now, colleges produce about 20 percent fewer history majors than a decade ago, as students have flocked to computer studies and engineering, according to government data.
Yet recent history grads have a lower unemployment rate (4.6 percent) than recent computer science grads (6.1 percent), according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. History is one of the most popular college majors among congressional staff members, and historians find work in some surprising places, such as the National Security Agency and the American Girl doll company.
“We’re the utility infielders of the workforce baseball team,” said Brendan Gillis, a historian who oversees the American Historical Association’s teaching and learning efforts.
While Weicksel says the end for historians is not near, she does expect AI to change how she and her peers do their jobs. The American Historical Association recently unveiled guidelines for using the technology responsibly in history education. Another committee is looking at best practices for AI in historical research, hoping the technology can be used to speed up research into massive document collections.
“People do see AI as threatening,” Weicksel said. “But generative AI can’t replace expertise.”
She said that’s because these programs can’t truly understand information and contextualize it the way historians do. She recalled how her college PhD adviser told her, as she studied for oral exams, that she didn’t need to worry about recalling specific dates: There are things that you can look up and there are things you need to know, and what you need to know is how to interpret events in a broader context.
To compare human jobs to AI, the Microsoft study broke down occupations into job tasks defined by the O*NET database, a kind of occupational dictionary developed with help from the Labor Department.
The study compared job tasks with a dataset of 200,000 conversations between users and Microsoft’s Bing Copilot AI, looking for where AI appeared to have successfully completed a similar task.
The researchers found the jobs most at risk from AI involved writing, sales, customer service and programming. The top 10 are interpreters and translators, then historians followed by: passenger attendants, sales representatives of services, writers and authors, customers service representatives, CNC tool programmers, telephone operators, ticket agents and travel clerks, and then broadcast announcers and radio DJs.
The safest jobs tended to involve physical labor or operating machinery: Dishwasher, roofer, embalmer. The occupation rated as the least impacted by AI: Dredge operator.
Top 10 jobs least at risk from AI
Table with 1 columns and 10 rows. (column headers with buttons are sortable)
Job title and AI Applicability Score
Dredge Operators 0%
Bridge and Lock Tenders 0%
Water Treatment Plant and System Op. 0%
Foundry Mold and Coremakers 0%
Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equip. Op. 0%
Pile Driver Operators 0%
Floor Sanders and Finishers 0%
Orderlies 0%
Motorboat Operators 0%
Logging Equipment Operators 1%
Source: Microsoft Research
The study, too, points out that a job with high AI overlap “does not mean the work activity is done to its full extent all of the time.”
The database defines a historian as someone who researches, analyzes, records and interprets the past as recorded in sources.
Ironically, the O*NET database used for the study lists historian as a job with a “bright outlook” that is expected to grow rapidly in the next several years.
There’s plenty of uncertainty about how the AI revolution will play out, although studies tend to agree on the kinds of jobs facing the greatest potential upheaval, said Mark Muro, a Brookings Institution fellow who has studied the impact of AI on work. Yet people probably shouldn’t make drastic career changes based on projected impacts, he said.
“I think that would be precipitous, to massively shift your pathway based on current information,” Muro said. “But there’s no room for complacency, either.”
Plotting out the impacts of the technology is tricky, the Microsoft researchers said in their study. They cite the rise of ATMs, which began in the United States during the 1970s and automated much of what a bank teller does. But ATMs actually led to more bank teller jobs, as banks opened more branches and tellers were free to focus on other tasks — a trend that held for decades until the rise of online banking services over the past 15 years, which has driven down the number of teller jobs.
Weicksel sounded confident about the future for historians.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
History will be the judge.