{"id":85004,"date":"2025-08-27T06:00:42","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T10:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=85004"},"modified":"2025-08-23T22:56:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T02:56:12","slug":"the-40-jobs-supposedly-most-at-risk-from-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2025\/08\/the-40-jobs-supposedly-most-at-risk-from-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"The 40 Jobs (Supposedly) Most at Risk from AI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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In last week\u2019s Monday Miscellany<\/a>, we posted about a study that purportedly showed the jobs that were safest from being displaced by Artificial Intelligence.\u00a0 As promised, we will now see what the study said about the jobs that are supposedly at the greatest risk.\u00a0 I say, \u201csupposedly\u201d because I don\u2019t believe it, as I will explain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This time I am working directly from the study, which was commissioned by Microsoft and is entitled Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI<\/a>.\u00a0 The researchers and authors of the report (assuming AI didn\u2019t write it for them) are Kiran Tomlinson, Sonia Jaffe, Will Wang, Scott Counts, and Siddharth Suri, all of whom are employees of Microsoft.<\/p>\n

\n

What they did was to break down various occupations according to the specific activities the job involves (e.g., getting information; analyzing information; caring for others; communicating to the public, etc.).\u00a0 Then they compared that information to the tasks that Microsoft\u2019s CoPilot AI system performed at users\u2019 requests over a nine-month period.\u00a0 From this data, they assigned an \u201cAI Applicability Score,\u201d with the highest scores indicating the occupations that AI could best perform.<\/p>\n

Here are the top 40 in order, with the highest AI Applicability Score\u2013that is, the occupation that could be most susceptible to AI\u2013given first:<\/p>\n

\n
    \n
  1. \n
      \n
    1. Interpreters and Translators<\/li>\n
    2. Historians<\/li>\n
    3. Passenger Attendants<\/li>\n
    4. Sales Representatives of Services<\/li>\n
    5. Writers and Authors<\/li>\n
    6. Customer Service Representatives<\/li>\n
    7. CNC Tool Programmers<\/li>\n
    8. Telephone Operators<\/li>\n
    9. Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks<\/li>\n
    10. Broadcast Announcers and Radio DJs<\/li>\n
    11. Brokerage Clerks<\/li>\n
    12. Photographers<\/li>\n
    13. Technical Writers<\/li>\n
    14. Tour Guides<\/li>\n
    15. Copy Editors and Proofreaders<\/li>\n
    16. Librarians<\/li>\n
    17. Museum Technicians<\/li>\n
    18. Archivists<\/li>\n
    19. Event Planners<\/li>\n
    20. Public Relations Specialists<\/li>\n
    21. Marketing Coordinators<\/li>\n
    22. Social Media Managers<\/li>\n
    23. Conference Coordinators<\/li>\n
    24. Advertising Sales Agents<\/li>\n
    25. Travel Agents<\/li>\n
    26. Court Reporters<\/li>\n
    27. Paralegals<\/li>\n
    28. Insurance Underwriters<\/li>\n
    29. Claims Adjusters<\/li>\n
    30. Survey Researchers<\/li>\n
    31. Market Research Analysts<\/li>\n
    32. Fundraisers<\/li>\n
    33. Grant Writers<\/li>\n
    34. Instructional Coordinators<\/li>\n
    35. Human Resources Specialists<\/li>\n
    36. Compensation and Benefits Analysts<\/li>\n
    37. Training and Development Specialists<\/li>\n
    38. Executive Assistants<\/li>\n
    39. Office Managers<\/li>\n
    40. Data Entry Keyers<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Historians are number 2?\u00a0 My fellow Patheos bloggers at Anxious Bench<\/a> are Christian historians who write about their work.\u00a0 Yes, they gather information analyze it, and write it up, and AI can do those sorts of \u201cactivities,\u201d but what they do goes far beyond what a Chatbot can do. Philip Jenkins<\/a> is currently telling us about his latest project, studying the discovery of the apocryphal gospels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and their\u00a0 impact on theologians and Biblical scholarship.\u00a0 First of all, setting aside the fact that he is working from dusty archives and ancient texts that are not going to be on the internet or in the training material AI has access to, how could AI think of such a project?\u00a0 How could AI find this \u201cinteresting\u201d and worth doing?\u00a0 AI could no doubt quickly find out what has already been written on this subject, but how can it add new knowledge, which is what good historians are all about?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

      Sales?\u00a0 AI might be able to identify customers and provide information, but can it look a customer in the eye and close a deal?<\/p>\n

      Writers and Authors?\u00a0 AI can generate a novel by following the conventions of other novels, but how can that avoid being conventional?<\/p>\n

      Photographers?\u00a0 Can AI line everybody up in a wedding and make them say \u201ccheese\u201d?\u00a0 Can AI distract two-year-olds so they will sit still and look at the camera?<\/p>\n

      Librarians?\u00a0 Can AI shush noisy patrons?<\/p>\n

      Fund raisers?\u00a0 Can AI sit down with potential donors and guilt them or persuade them to write a check?<\/p>\n

      Office Managers?\u00a0 Can AI offer leadership that keeps other employees motivated and on track?<\/p>\n

      Now, contrary to how this research is being played up in the media<\/a>, I think what the study really shows at the very most is not so much what jobs might be replaced by AI, but what jobs might make the most use of AI.\u00a0 The human being in the job is still critical, as is, as we have argued<\/a>, the human element that defines it.<\/p>\n

      Also, I have to question the research design.\u00a0 CoPilot is mostly used along with Microsoft Word, with which it is now packaged, as I\u2019ve complained<\/a>.\u00a0 To base the capacity of AI on a large sample of how people are actually using CoPilot is to over-represent writing-based jobs.\u00a0 How it is used is a different question from what it can do.<\/p>\n

      On the other side of the project, the research is based on a superficial understanding of what most of these jobs actually entail.\u00a0 Breaking them all down into \u201cactivities\u201d\u2013that is, behaviors, following the assumptions of the outdated behavioralists in the social sciences\u2013is highly reductionistic, leaving out the thinking<\/em> that is necessary to direct the activities and that defines the job.<\/p>\n

      Artificial intelligence is not enough.\u00a0 In order for a machine to come close to replacing a human being, it would also need artificial imagination, artificial innovation, artificial instincts, artificial insight, artificial creativity, and artificial agency, to name a few.\u00a0 It would also need to jump out of the computer screen to interact with physical, social, personal, moral, and spiritual reality in a way that goes far beyond the capacity of robots and androids.<\/p>\n

      More deeply, God has given human beings vocations<\/em><\/a> which God Himself works through as we use the gifts He has given us to love and serve our neighbors.\u00a0 AI has no neighbors and cannot love them.\u00a0\u00a0AI will never replace human vocations because AI does not have a vocation.<\/p>\n

      \u00a0<\/p>\n

      Illustration:\u00a0 Artificial Intelligence: We\u2019re coming for your jobs!<\/a> by arbyreed via Flickr, \u00a0<\/span><\/span>CC BY-NC-SA 2.0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

      \n
      <\/div>\n<\/div>\n
      \n
      \n

      \n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      A Microsoft research project broke down human jobs into their “work activities” and correlated them to tasks performed by their CoPilot AI program, coming up with a ranking of jobs according to their “AI applicability.” But the results are profoundly misleading. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":85064,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,48],"tags":[16715,16967,16970],"class_list":["post-85004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","category-vocation","tag-ai-and-vocation","tag-ai-displacing-human-jobs","tag-microsofts-study-of-ai-and-occupations"],"yoast_head":"\nThe 40 Jobs (Supposedly) Most at Risk from AI<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A Microsoft research project broke down human jobs into their "work activities" and correlated them to tasks performed by their CoPilot AI program, coming up with a ranking of jobs according to their "AI applicability." 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