EXPOSED
Lecture drafting, slide decks, exam item writing, syllabus updates, and first-pass grading of short answers are already handled well by current models, and much of the content-delivery layer of intro biology is commoditized. What resists is the wet lab — running dissections, microscopy, cell culture, and PCR benches with novices who break things — plus research mentorship, thesis supervision, and being the person a student trusts when they're deciding whether to go to grad school. The modal worker here is increasingly contingent (adjunct/lecturer) rather than tenured, and that tier is the most exposed: enrollment-driven, teaching-only, and easiest to substitute with larger sections plus AI-assisted course materials.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. An 11 reflects the split inside one job: the 200-seat intro-bio lecture, its slide deck, its multiple-choice bank, and its canned lab manual are all reproducible without you, while supervising an undergrad who just contaminated a cell line, calibrating a microtome, or reading a student's messy honors thesis draft for conceptual errors still requires you in the room — if you taught only lecture-hall genetics you'd sit near 6, if you ran a research lab full-time you'd sit near 15.
Some physical or field component. 11 puts you above the desk-bound faculty because teaching lab means gloves on, autoclave running, dissection trays, fume hoods, chemical hygiene and BSL-1/2 protocols, plus field sections at a pond or forest plot — but it isn't a 16 because the environment is a controlled teaching lab with known reagents and a written protocol, not an unpredictable job site.
Certification preferred, not legally required. 5/20 because a PhD plus departmental hiring is the only gate: no state licensure, no board certification, nothing that legally requires a credentialed human to deliver a biology course, and accreditation reviews credit hours and program outcomes rather than named individuals, so the institution can restructure who fronts a section at will.
The human relationship is the product. 14 is earned on the recommendation letter, the lab-position offer, and the office-hours conversation where a sophomore decides whether they can do science — those depend on a named person who has watched a specific student at the bench for two semesters, and that is why departments still keep faculty even as content moves online.
Meaningful discretion. 12 covers the calls you actually own — an academic-integrity report, a grade appeal, whether a student is ready to co-author, whether a protocol is safe for undergrads to run — but curriculum outcomes, prerequisites, and grading floors arrive from the department and program review, so the discretion is real but bounded rather than the unreviewed high-stakes judgment of a 17.
Neurologists SAFE
Has AI actually changed your work?