{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/computer-and-information-research-scientists/",
  "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": "Computer and Information Research Scientists",
    "soc_code": "15-1221",
    "category": "Tech",
    "us_employment": 37200,
    "median_annual_wage": 140300
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 40,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 12,
    "embodiment": 3,
    "liability_shield": 2,
    "trust_premium": 8,
    "judgment_accountability": 15
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "A 12 reflects the split inside a single working week: the implementation half — writing training loops, sweeping hyperparameters, running ablations, building the results table, drafting related-work sections and NSF/DARPA narrative boilerplate — is already being done by coding agents at rates a first-year grad student can't match, while the half that holds is formulating a hypothesis that isn't already saturated, deciding what baseline would actually falsify it, and recognizing when a benchmark gain is measurement artifact rather than signal; it sits below 14 because that formulation work is itself text, not an act the tools are structurally barred from.",
    "embodiment": "A 3 covers the little that isn't a laptop and a cluster queue: standing up GPU nodes, physical robotics or HCI apparatus for the minority of researchers in those subfields, and conference travel — nothing that requires your hands in an uncontrolled setting, since the SLURM job runs whether you're in the building or not.",
    "liability_shield": "A 2 is close to floor because no jurisdiction licenses computer scientists: your PhD is a credential, not a practice permit, and when a published result fails to replicate the consequence is a retraction and reputational damage, not a board action — the only formal exposure is IRB approval and export-control or classification rules on specific projects, which attach to the institution rather than to you personally.",
    "trust_premium": "An 8 is earned by the parts of the role that are genuinely relational — the program officer who funds you because your last three grants delivered, the product VP who greenlights a research direction on your read of it, the coauthors and students who work with you and not a substitute — but the primary output is a paper or a repo evaluated blind on its merits, and citations accrue to the result regardless of who you are.",
    "judgment_accountability": "A 15 is where it lands because you are the person who says a research direction is worth eighteen months of a team's headcount and compute budget, that a safety or capability claim is sound enough to publish under an institution's name, and that a negative result should kill a program — calls with no procedure to follow, made on incomplete evidence, and traceable to you when they turn out wrong."
  },
  "rationale": "The daily substance of this job — literature review, prototype code, ablation scripts, results tables, paper and grant drafting — is exactly the text-and-code work frontier models already do at usable quality, and this occupation is uniquely exposed because it builds the tools that automate it. What resists is choosing which problems are worth attacking, designing experiments whose results are actually informative, and owning claims that a lab, a funder, or a product organization will bet on. The modal worker is a PhD researcher in industry or a federally funded lab, not a tenured professor; no license protects the role, and headcount concentrates around the people who set research agendas rather than execute them.",
  "outlook": "By 2035 the field produces far more papers and prototypes per researcher, with hiring concentrated on agenda-setters, evaluators, and those bridging research to deployed systems while junior implementation roles thin out.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift is genuine here: if agentic coding and literature tools absorb the ablation-script/results-table/related-work tier, the residual job is problem selection, experiment design that yields informative negative results, and adjudicating whether a benchmark gain is real. This raises task_resistance for the surviving (smaller) headcount even with no institutional change.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Frontier-model safety evaluation and red-team science becoming a distinct research function with no self-referential automation path — e.g. work under the US/UK AI Safety Institute evaluation agreements, or EU AI Act Article 55 systemic-risk model evaluations, where the evaluator cannot be the system under evaluation.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Named-researcher accountability for model release decisions: if internal frontier-safety frameworks (Anthropic RSP, OpenAI Preparedness, Google DeepMind FSF) harden into audited sign-offs where a specific research lead attests capability-threshold findings, the role owns a consequential call under ambiguity.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "A statutory attestation duty attaching to a named individual — e.g. EU AI Act GPAI obligations or a US state frontier-model law (California SB 53-style transparency reporting) implemented so that a designated technical officer or research lead personally signs capability and risk evaluations, with penalties for false attestation.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Research-integrity exposure: if federal funders (NIH/NSF) or journals require a named human to attest that results were not fabricated by generative tools, with debarment consequences, a weak personal-liability hook appears — weak because it is administrative, not licensure.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Export-control and clearance gating: if advanced-compute or model-weights work requires cleared US persons (BIS rules, DoD/IC contracts), buyers are paying for a specific human body rather than a capability, and that premium is structural rather than sentimental.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "No licensure body exists for this occupation and none is being proposed, so liability_shield has a low realistic ceiling; the attestation routes above attach to a handful of senior leads, not to the 37k. Trust premium cannot rise on craft grounds — funders and product orgs buy results, not human authorship. The dominant risk is not scored here: headcount concentration, where the judgment tier survives but employs far fewer people."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 30780,
        "wage": 122840
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 30220,
        "wage": 126830
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 30840,
        "wage": 131490
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 33780,
        "wage": 136620
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 35210,
        "wage": 145080
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 38480,
        "wage": 140910
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 37200,
        "wage": 140300
      }
    ],
    "from": 2019,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 20.9,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": false
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}