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The launch set

Twenty occupations

A launch set, not a census. These twenty cover the full range of the scale, from work that is being rebuilt to work that is anchored in place. Which twenty is still genuinely open (Q-04): the five the essay needs are fixed, the other fifteen are a proposal.

  1. 84 Hairdresser The highest score on the site. Cutting hair on a living, moving head is a harder robotics problem than almost anything in this list. Anchored
  2. 82 Plumber The clearest illustration of Moravec's paradox on the site. The reasoning is easy for a machine. The crawlspace is not. Anchored
  3. 79 Primary school teacher Heavily assisted, barely automated. The preparation moves. The classroom does not. Holding
  4. 79 Electrician Plumbing's near neighbour, and a useful check on the map: two trades, almost the same score, arrived at the same way. Holding
  5. 75 Aged care worker One of the fastest-growing occupations in most of the countries in the register, and one of the least exposed. Both facts are usually reported separately. Holding
  6. 73 General practitioner Heavily assisted and barely automated. The diagnosis gets help; the consultation does not. Holding
  7. 72 Registered nurse Paperwork is the exposed part. Everything the job is actually about happens within arm's length of another person. Holding
  8. 69 Chef Robots have been cooking in labs for a decade. A commercial kitchen at seven on a Friday is a different problem entirely. Holding
  9. 65 Fashion designer Scores higher than product design, for a reason that has nothing to do with taste and everything to do with hands, cloth and fit. Holding
  10. 59 Civil engineer A profession where being wrong is measured in lives, which turns out to be the thing that holds it in place. Blending
  11. 55 Product designer A bundle of tasks that has already been rebuilt twice in one career. The drawing is the part that moved. The deciding is the part that did not. Blending
  12. 44 Software developer The most assisted job on the site, and one of the more exposed. Both of those are true at once, which is the entire reason the two numbers are shown separately. Shifting
  13. 43 Graphic designer Shares an ISCO unit group with product design and sits nowhere near it on the map. That gap is the strongest argument on this site for not trusting a job title. Shifting
  14. 34 Heavy truck driver The one job on this site where the robotics number, not the language-model number, decides the outcome. Shifting
  15. 32 Data analyst Among the most assisted occupations here and among the more exposed. Asking the right question survives; producing the answer largely does not. Shifting
  16. 31 Paralegal Highly exposed and highly assisted at the same time. The difficulty is that the exposed tasks are the ones juniors used to learn on. Shifting
  17. 28 Accountant Automated continuously since the spreadsheet, and still growing. Which is either reassuring or a warning, depending on which decade you look at. Shifting
  18. 24 Copywriter The occupation most people picture when they picture AI taking a job, and one of the few where that picture is broadly right. Rebuilding
  19. 13 Bank teller Near the bottom of the site, and the most misread job in the whole automation argument. The cash machine did not end the teller. What ended the teller came later, and it looked like a phone. Rebuilding
  20. 12 Customer service representative The lowest score on the site. It is also one of the largest employers on it, which is the whole problem in one line. Rebuilding

Every figure is placeholder data. Scale and thresholds are provisional (Q-02).

Not one of the twenty

These have no score of their own yet. Each one points at the nearest occupation that does, matched by hand rather than by arithmetic — there is nothing to compute a distance from until they have declared inputs of their own.

63 signposted, 20 scored. Coverage grows once the method is settled, not before.