{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/anthropology-and-archeology-teachers-postsecondary/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Anthropology and Archeology Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1061", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 5240, "median_annual_wage": 99650 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 51, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 11, "embodiment": 12, "liability_shield": 3, "trust_premium": 14, "judgment_accountability": 11 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "An intro-to-cultural-anthropology lecture, its slide deck, its reading guide, and its multiple-choice midterm are all reproducible by a model today, but running a five-week field school where you decide which trench to open, teaching a student to distinguish a retouched flake from a natural break with the object in their hand, and directing a dissertation through IRB and committee revisions are not — that split is why this sits at 11 rather than down at 6.", "embodiment": "Field seasons put you in trenches with a trowel, total station, and screens in heat and rain, and lab sections mean handling human skeletal remains, ceramics, and lithics with students at the bench — but a large share of the teaching year is still classroom and office work, and many in this SOC line no longer run active excavations at all, which keeps this at 12 instead of the 16+ of a full-time field director.", "liability_shield": "There is no licensure board for anthropology instruction; the PhD is a hiring credential, not a legal one, and when a permit or NAGPRA compliance issue arises the liability sits with the institution, the state historic preservation office, or the permit-holding PI — the 3 reflects only that ARPA and NAGPRA obligations attach to named individuals on excavation permits.", "trust_premium": "Thesis and dissertation advising is the product here: a student's committee letter, field school reference, and the network you place them into are non-transferable, and long-term relationships with tribal representatives, descendant communities, and site landowners are held by a person, not a department — 14 rather than higher because the enrollment-driving intro courses are anonymous and interchangeable.", "judgment_accountability": "You decide whether an undergraduate's field data are clean enough to publish, whether to halt a dig on encountering human remains and initiate consultation, and whether a candidate is ready to defend — real calls with consequences, but bounded by curriculum committees, permit conditions, and IRB review, which is why this reads 11 and not 15." }, "rationale": "The paper layer of this job — lecture notes, syllabi, reading summaries, literature reviews, first-pass grading of undergraduate essays, artifact catalog descriptions — is already within reach of current models, and online intro sections are the most exposed part of the load. What holds is live seminar teaching, field school supervision at excavation sites, hands-on lab instruction in osteology and lithics, and thesis mentorship where a named human vouches for a student. The bigger near-term threat is not AI but shrinking humanities enrollment and adjunctification; the modal worker here is increasingly contingent, not tenured.", "outlook": "In ten years the lecture-and-grade portion of this job is largely AI-assisted and taught by fewer people, while field schools, labs, and graduate mentorship remain human — the occupation contracts and concentrates around hands-on and community-facing work.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "Field school accreditation tightening: if the Register of Professional Archaeologists / RPA-recognized field school standards or state SHPO permit conditions require a named, on-site supervisor with a fixed low student-to-supervisor ratio for excavation credit, the physically-present supervision hours become a mandated core of the job rather than an optional summer add-on. Same effect if NAGPRA repatriation consultation and osteological handling are restricted to in-person credentialed instruction.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Cultural resource management is the licensure-adjacent edge: Section 106 review reports and state permit applications already require a Secretary of the Interior-qualified principal investigator to sign. If SHPOs or the ACHP issue guidance requiring that signer to personally attest that AI-generated site descriptions, artifact catalogs and literature reviews were human-verified — mirroring the attestation language spreading in engineering and appraisal boards — the faculty who hold PI qualification gain a genuine, personal, non-delegable signature.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "IRB and NAGPRA governance load: if universities respond to AI-assisted research misconduct by requiring named faculty to personally certify the provenance and consent chain of every human-remains or ethnographic dataset used in coursework and theses, the ambiguous calls (repatriation disputes, descendant-community objections, whether a dataset is ethically usable) concentrate on the faculty member rather than the committee.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Genuine two-tier structure: intro survey lecturing and first-pass essay grading are the routine tier; the residue is method training in lithics/osteology, thesis supervision, and site interpretation under incomplete evidence. If institutions consolidate intro sections into AI-supported large formats while retaining faculty for methods and capstone supervision, the surviving job is denser in unautomatable work — but this raises the score of the role while cutting headcount.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Thesis and dissertation vouching is the only durable premium: if graduate admissions and hiring committees formalize a requirement for named-human letters with verified direct supervision hours (as some AAA and SAA discussions of mentorship documentation suggest), the signature-of-a-known-scholar function becomes something students explicitly select programs for.", "plausibility": "unlikely", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "Every lever here raises the score of the surviving position without protecting the modal worker. The binding constraint is humanities enrollment decline and adjunctification, which AI exposure scores do not measure: liability and accreditation gains accrue to PI-qualified or tenured faculty, and contingent instructors teaching intro online sections capture none of them. A realistic combined ceiling is the mid-60s, and that ceiling describes a smaller occupation." }, "adjudication": { "method": "two independent runs agreed on the verdict", "outcome": "corroborated", "run_totals": [ 51, 48 ], "run_verdicts": [ "EXPOSED", "EXPOSED" ] }, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 5770, "wage": 81580 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 5890, "wage": 83940 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 5850, "wage": 86220 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 5590, "wage": 89220 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 5010, "wage": 97340 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 4930, "wage": 85000 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 5030, "wage": 93650 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 5260, "wage": 95770 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 5240, "wage": 99650 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -9.2, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }