{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/atmospheric-earth-marine-and-space-sciences-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": "Atmospheric, Earth, Marine, and Space Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1051", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 9900, "median_annual_wage": 103170 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 54, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 12, "embodiment": 12, "liability_shield": 3, "trust_premium": 14, "judgment_accountability": 13 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "A 12 sits above the desk-bound humanities lecturer because half your teaching load is irreducible — taking students to a road cut and making them argue about the contact, calibrating a sonde on a cruise, troubleshooting a mass spec — but the intro-course machinery of writing lectures on plate tectonics, generating problem sets on geostrophic balance, and grading multiple-choice exams for 200-seat GEOL 101 is now largely machine work, which keeps it out of the 14+ band.", "embodiment": "Field camp in the Wasatch, a two-week berth on a UNOLS vessel, and hands-on rock saw and thin-section lab supervision put you well past screen-only, but the reason this is 12 and not 17 is that the majority of contact hours in most academic years happen in a lecture hall and an office, with the uncontrolled-environment work concentrated in a summer session or one field methods course.", "liability_shield": "There is no license to teach oceanography — no state board, no PE stamp, no equivalent of the Professional Geologist registration that consulting geologists in states like Texas actually need — so the 3 reflects only that field trips and shipboard work carry institutional safety duties and small-boat or research-diver certifications that a non-human cannot hold.", "trust_premium": "14 is earned on the graduate side: your name on a dissertation committee, the recommendation letter that gets a student a USGS or NOAA postdoc, and the years of co-authorship where students learn your judgment about which data to trust — that relationship is the product, though the anonymous intro-survey lecture that most of your FTE is measured against is what stops this from reaching 17.", "judgment_accountability": "Deciding a student's field mapping is publishable, calling off a traverse when weather turns, judging whether an anomalous isotope result is instrumentation or discovery, and setting the ambiguous line between struggling and unqualified in a qualifying exam are all yours to own — 13 rather than 16 because these calls are reviewable by committees, department chairs, and IRB/safety officers rather than being final and unappealable." }, "rationale": "Lecture prep, syllabus writing, problem-set generation, grading, and literature summaries for intro geology/meteorology/oceanography courses are already substantially automatable, and enrollment pressure in small earth-science departments is a bigger near-term threat than AI itself. What holds is the embodied and relational core: running field camps and research cruises, teaching students to read outcrops and calibrate instruments, supervising labs, and advising graduate researchers who need a human to vouch for their work. No licensure protects the role, so the moat is field instruction, funded research, and mentorship rather than credentialing.", "outlook": "The lecture-delivery half of the job thins out and small departments consolidate, but faculty anchored in field instruction, lab supervision, and funded research keep their positions through the decade.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "Accreditation or program-review requirements that make a supervised residential field camp (e.g., the geology field-camp requirement retained by many ABET-style geoscience programs and state PG licensure boards such as Texas's, which credit specific field hours) a non-waivable degree component — plus NSF/UNOLS ship-time and research-cruise berths tied to a named shipboard instructor of record. Every hour of instruction that must happen on an outcrop, a research vessel, or with a calibrated field instrument is an hour no model performs.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "State Professional Geologist boards (about 30 states license PGs; ASBOG administers the FG/PG exams) tightening the rule that only courses taught or certified by a licensed PG count toward exam eligibility, making a licensed human the signer on field-hour and course-content attestations. Parallel route: institutional lab-safety and marine-operations rules naming a specific instructor as personally responsible for student safety during field and shipboard activities, backed by university insurers after a field-trip injury claim.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Task-mix shift plus formal authorship rules: as lecture prep and grading are absorbed, the residual job becomes doctoral committee service, funding-proposal PI responsibility, and research-integrity calls. Concretely, if NSF/journal policies (already tightening AI-authorship rules at AGU, Nature, and NSF's 2023-24 proposal guidance) require a named human to certify that a student's data, model output, and interpretation are not machine-fabricated, the advisor personally owns a consequential ambiguous judgment.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Genuine two-tier structure: intro-survey lecturing and problem sets versus field mapping instruction, instrument calibration, and dissertation supervision. If departments consolidate intro courses into shared/online sections and reallocate remaining faculty lines to field methods, capstone research, and graduate mentoring, the measured residual task set is the judgment tier. Watch for department restructurings that cut intro sections while preserving field-camp and thesis-advising loads.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Narrow route only: employers and graduate admissions continuing to weight a named human's letter of recommendation and field-camp evaluation, which AI cannot supply as a reputational stake. This does not extend to classroom teaching, where students are not observably paying extra for a human instructor.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "No licensure gates the teaching role itself, so the liability route is indirect and caps low. The dominant risk is not AI capability but enrollment collapse in small earth-science departments — every lever above can move and the occupation can still shrink through line elimination." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 10730, "wage": 87380 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 11020, "wage": 90860 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 11020, "wage": 92040 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 11750, "wage": 94520 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 10250, "wage": 98070 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 11150, "wage": 97770 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 11770, "wage": 100690 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 11480, "wage": 101390 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 9900, "wage": 103170 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -7.7, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }