Welcome back to The AI Shift, our weekly reflection on how artificial intelligence is shaking up the world of work. A growing pile of papers and reports have been published over the past few years setting out which jobs are likely to be the most vulnerable to AI displacement and assessing whether that assumed threat has become a reality. But how well do these exposure scores match up to one another, and are they capturing all — or even most — of the factors that have historically shaped where, when and how technologies have disrupted the labour market?

John writes

This is a topic that has been a bugbear for both of us for some time. Last week it was brought into the open in the form of a new report by Martha Gimbel and her team at the Yale Budget Lab, which unpacked seven different measures of occupation-level AI exposure and found that while there was broad agreement on which jobs were not at risk of automation, there was considerable disagreement over how exposed jobs are at the other end of the spectrum were. Almost all approaches agree software developers are highly exposed, but web designers and journalists are a different story, scoring as highly exposed by some estimates but only moderately by others.