EXPOSED
Part 2020 shock, part continued decline in the years since.
Median pay $35,610 → $46,330 +4.1% 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
-12.1% 174,700 → 153,600 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -12.1% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
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.
~14,400 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
CutterSawyerSetterBevelerBlankerNotcherSlasherAdjusterClincherShearmanJigsawyerPlanisherCan CutterDie CutterDie SetterFabricatorKey CutterTin CutterBolt CutterCoil CutterCoil ShaperIron BenderLink CutterPipe Bender
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Loading blanks, changing dies, adjusting ram stroke and shut height, and clearing jams still need a body at the press, but CNC turret punches with auto tool changers, servo feeds, and light-curtain part ejection already run the cutting cycle itself unattended — the setup and tending survive, the operating does not, which is what puts this at 10 rather than 14.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You work at a machine that can amputate: hanging 200-lb dies with a hoist, shimming and bolting them into the bed, feeding coil stock, deburring, and checking first-off parts with calipers on a floor with oil, scrap, and noise — not a controlled cell, though it is at least a fixed station rather than a jobsite, which holds it at 15.
No licence, no signature requirement No state licence gates who runs a press brake; the employer's OSHA 1910.217 duties, point-of-operation guarding, and any die-setter qualification are internal certifications and shop policy, so nothing legally requires that the person at the controls be you.
Meaningful discretion You decide when tooling is dull, when a burr means stop the run, and how to tweak feed or tonnage to hold tolerance on a bowing part — real calls made without asking, but bounded by the job's print, the spec sheet, and a setup sheet somebody else wrote, which is a 7 and not a 12.
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 (10/20 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 (2/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (3/20) 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 12 of this occupation's 37 points (32%).
Embodiment (15/20) 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.
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 50/100, still EXPOSED.
Routine tending is absorbed by automatic loaders and adaptive CNC, leaving the setter tier: die changeover, tonnage/shut-height and springback correction on new alloys (AHSS, aluminum), first-article troubleshooting. If the title's day becomes mostly setup and process correction rather than cycle-start-and-watch, the residual is judgment-heavy.
Job mix shifts toward short-run, high-mix job shops and heavy/awkward stock where fixturing, deburring, sheet handling, and crash recovery on aging non-networked presses stay manual; robot cells pay back only on long runs, so the surviving press work is precisely the unautomatable setup-and-fix tier.
AS9100 / IATF 16949 and NADCAP first-article inspection regimes that require a named operator signature on FAI and dimensional buyoff for aerospace and safety-critical automotive stampings, plus material-traceability sign-off, put the scrap/recall call on the operator under ambiguity.
OSHA machine-guarding/lockout enforcement or an insurer requirement naming a qualified person who must personally verify point-of-operation safeguarding and die-setting after each changeover — analogous to existing ANSI B11.1 press-brake and two-hand-control requirements — would attach a named human to each setup, not just a general employer duty.
The limit. No realistic route to a trust premium: buyers of stamped parts specify tolerance and cert, never who or what ran the press. Even with every lever, this stays a mid-scoring occupation and the headcount question is decided by cell automation economics, not by the score.
| Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI | 11,650 | $50,460 +9% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 6,320 | $50,770 +10% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 4,490 | $48,710 +5% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 4,440 | $43,950 -5% |
| Grand Rapids-Wyoming-Kentwood, MI | 4,270 | $42,050 -9% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 3,810 | $43,420 -6% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 3,490 | $48,640 +5% |
| Cleveland, OH | 3,220 | $46,300 +0% |
| Flint, MI | 380 | $78,600 +70% |
| Rome, GA | 200 | $63,740 +38% |
| Oshkosh-Neenah, WI | 560 | $62,250 +34% |
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 37. 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.