EXPOSED
The core of this job — fastening ride restraints, checking rider height, handing out skates and clubs, sweeping the midway, breaking up horseplay in a pool queue — is embodied work in a crowded, unpredictable environment that today's robotics cannot touch. What is disappearing is the transactional half: ticket booths, wristband sales, equipment checkout logs, and reservation phone calls are already being absorbed by kiosks, QR scanning, and app-based booking, which is why headcount per venue keeps drifting down. No license protects the role and pay is near minimum wage, so operators cut positions the moment a turnstile or self-serve rental locker can cover them.
Dipped in 2020, then grew past where it started.
Median pay $23,370 → $32,150 +10.1% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+3.4% 392,300 → 405,500 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +3.4% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 47/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~102,400 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
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Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier At 13 the split is real: physically latching a lap bar, spotting a kid who unbuckled mid-queue, and clearing a jammed bowling pinsetter resist automation entirely, but ticket sales, wristband issuance, rental checkout, and party booking — often a third or more of a shift — already run through kiosks and apps, which keeps this out of the 14-plus band.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments 16 reflects a shift spent on your feet in weather, noise, and crowds — walking the load platform, hauling go-kart tires, chest-deep in a pool to reset lane lines, mopping a slide runout — in a space full of moving machinery and unpredictable children rather than a fixed workcell.
No licence, no signature requirement 3 is right because no state licenses ride attendants; lifeguard or CPR cards and operator-specific ride certifications are employer requirements, not statutory ones, and when a restraint fails the state ride inspector and the operator's insurer answer for it, not the person who pushed the dispatch button.
Meaningful discretion 7 sits just into discretion because most of the day is checklist work — height sticks, restraint pull-tests, cycle counts — yet you personally call whether to refuse a rider, e-stop the ride, or pull an intoxicated guest, decisions made in seconds with a supervisor's radio backup rather than sole ownership.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (13/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (3/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (8/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (7/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 18 of this occupation's 47 points (38%).
Embodiment (16/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to amusement and recreation attendants on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 64/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift with no new law: once ticketing, rentals, waivers and queue management are fully kiosk/app-based, the residual job is the safety-judgment tier — deciding whether a rider's restraint seated correctly, whether a guest is impaired, whether to e-stop, crowd control during an evacuation. Headcount falls, but the surviving role scores higher on resistance. Watchable marker: job postings retitled 'ride safety operator' with certification listed as required rather than 'attendant'.
Aquatic-facility rules already require certified lifeguards and Certified Pool Operators; if state health codes extend mandated ratios and named-certificate-holder-on-duty requirements to splash pads, wave features and inflatable water parks — a live topic in several state health department rulemakings after drowning clusters — the pool/waterpark slice of this SOC gains a real license floor.
State amusement-ride safety codes moving from 'trained' to individually credentialed and named operators — e.g. New Jersey's Carnival-Amusement Ride Safety Act operator permit regime, Pennsylvania Act 121 rules, or California DOSH permanent-ride requirements — extended so that a named, board-certified (NAARSO/AIMS/CDC-style) attendant must sign the daily restraint-check and pre-open log and is personally citable for a failure. Insurer-driven version: amusement liability carriers (a thin market since a few carriers dominate) requiring a certified, named operator per ride cluster as a condition of coverage after a high-profile restraint fatality.
Operator-authority codification: state rules or ASTM F770/F2461 practice updates making the on-ride attendant's refusal-to-load and emergency-stop decision explicitly non-overridable by a supervisor or throughput system, with the decision logged under that person's credential. This converts an informal call into an owned one and is the kind of clause that appears after NTSB-style ride investigations.
The limit. Trust premium is omitted deliberately: buyers of amusement admission do not choose a venue because a human handed them skates, and there is no visible willingness-to-pay mechanism to build on. Even with full certification, this remains a near-minimum-wage role whose count per venue is set by required safety ratios rather than demand — regulation can protect the position's existence and defensibility without raising its pay or headcount.
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 22,410 | $37,630 +17% |
| Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL | 20,030 | $30,940 -4% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 18,420 | $35,910 +12% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 9,590 | $38,000 +18% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 9,340 | $34,170 +6% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 8,490 | $28,080 -13% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 8,290 | $32,220 +0% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 7,420 | $31,410 -2% |
| Kahului-Wailuku, HI | 710 | $49,020 +52% |
| Anchorage, AK | 170 | $45,780 +42% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 2,860 | $42,850 +33% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 47. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.