{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/historians/", "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": "Historians", "soc_code": "19-3093", "category": "Science", "us_employment": 3450, "median_annual_wage": 76750 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 36, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 8, "embodiment": 6, "liability_shield": 4, "trust_premium": 8, "judgment_accountability": 10 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "An 8 reflects the split in an actual week: literature review, chronology-building, drafting Section 106 effects narratives, and writing exhibit label copy are already machine-drafted at usable quality, while paleography on an unindexed 18th-century deed book, cross-checking a courthouse fire gap against county tax rolls, and establishing provenance chains for a repatriation claim still require a person in the reading room — the resisting share is real but is the minority of billable hours.", "embodiment": "A 6 covers travel to archives, county recorders' offices, and field visits to survey a building for National Register eligibility — real time out of the chair, but in climate-controlled reading rooms and standing structures with gloves and a camera, not the uncontrolled conditions that push a score into the teens.", "liability_shield": "A 4 is the floor plus nothing: there is no state licence to practice history, and while Secretary of the Interior Professional Qualification Standards (36 CFR 61) gate who can author a Section 106 or NRHP determination, that is an employer/agency credential check on a CV, not a personal licence that can be revoked or sued.", "trust_premium": "An 8 recognizes that repeat clients — a tribal historic preservation office, a law firm needing a toxic-tort corporate-knowledge expert, a county commission — hire a specific historian they have worked with and whose testimony held up, but the deliverable is still a report that gets read by people who never meet you, unlike a therapist or a family lawyer.", "judgment_accountability": "A 10 sits at the top of real discretion without crossing into 14+: deciding that a fragmentary record supports a finding of adverse effect, or that a company plausibly knew about asbestos hazards by 1948, is a contestable call you defend in deposition or peer review — but the consequences land on an agency decision or a jury verdict, and the historian is one input among engineers, archaeologists, and counsel." }, "rationale": "The bulk of a historian's paid day is reading, summarizing, synthesizing secondary literature, drafting narrative text, and preparing exhibit copy, reports, or background briefs — exactly the work large language models already do at usable quality and enormous speed. What resists is physical archival work: locating and handling uncatalogued manuscripts, reading damaged or handwritten primary sources in context, authenticating provenance, and standing behind an interpretive claim under professional or legal scrutiny. There is no license, no signature requirement, and a tiny national headcount (about 3,450), so most employed historians work in government, consulting, museums, or historic preservation rather than pure scholarship — and those roles pay for defensible judgment, not prose volume.", "outlook": "By 2035 the writing-and-synthesis half of the job is largely machine-assisted, and the paid roles concentrate in compliance history, provenance, and litigation support where a named human must defend the finding.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Section 106 / NHPA and NEPA review already require a qualified professional meeting the Secretary of the Interior's Professional Qualification Standards (36 CFR 61) to author and sign historic-property determinations and HABS/HAER documentation. If SHPOs or the ACHP add an explicit certification that the signing historian personally verified archival sources and did not rely on unverified generative output — analogous to the attorney AI-verification standing orders many federal judges adopted in 2023-24 — the signature becomes personally attributable rather than nominal.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 5 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Expert-witness historians in tobacco, asbestos, lead-paint, tribal water-rights and Indian Claims-type litigation are already subject to Daubert/FRE 702 and Rule 26 disclosure; the 2023 amendment to FRE 702 tightened the proponent's burden. A court rule or state bar practice requiring the testifying historian to certify primary-source review and disclose AI assistance would attach real sanction exposure to the opinion.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Genuine two-tier occupation: if the literature-review, exhibit-copy and background-brief tier is absorbed, what remains is uncatalogued and unscanned manuscript work, paleography on damaged hands, provenance authentication, and adversarial source criticism — the residual job is the judgment tier. Watchable signal: consulting and museum job postings shifting from 'research and write' to 'verify, authenticate, testify'.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 5 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Provenance and repatriation work under the revised NAGPRA regulations (effective January 2024, shifting deference to tribal traditional knowledge and tightening institutional deadlines) plus museum due-diligence on Nazi-era and colonial-era acquisitions makes a named historian the owner of consequential, contested, reversible-by-litigation calls.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Narrow but real: if archives, university presses or grant funders adopt disclosure-and-verification requirements for AI-assisted historical scholarship (the AHA has issued statements on generative AI in the discipline), a human-attested provenance chain becomes the purchased good for authentication and litigation clients. This does not extend to popular narrative history, where buyers show no demonstrated willingness to pay for human authorship.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 }, { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "Volume of undigitized material is the floor here — most local, county, corporate and foreign-language holdings remain unscanned and unindexed, so on-site handling, condition assessment and in-context reading of fragile originals cannot be remoted. This score rises only relatively, as digitizable work leaves the occupation.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "Headcount of ~3,450 caps everything: too small to sustain a licensing board, and no state has ever proposed one. The realistic top is roughly the mid-50s, driven almost entirely by the federal-preservation signature and expert-witness channels — which describe maybe a third of employed historians. For historians whose work is synthesis and narrative writing, none of these levers reach them, and no plausible mechanism gives that work a trust premium." }, "adjudication": { "method": "mean of two independent runs; verdict robust to rounding", "outcome": "rescored", "run_totals": [ 32, 40 ], "run_verdicts": [ "COOKED", "EXPOSED" ] }, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 3060, "wage": 59120 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 3040, "wage": 61140 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 3040, "wage": 63680 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 2770, "wage": 63100 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 2910, "wage": 63940 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 3120, "wage": 64540 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 3040, "wage": 72890 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 3140, "wage": 74050 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 3450, "wage": 76750 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 12.7, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "anthropologists-and-archeologists", "title": "Anthropologists and Archeologists", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 51, "median_wage": 70770, "overlap": 79, "skills_to_close": [ "Mathematics", "Systems Analysis", "Systems Evaluation", "Management of Personnel Resources" ] }, { "slug": "anthropology-and-archeology-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Anthropology and Archeology Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 51, "median_wage": 99650, "overlap": 78, "skills_to_close": [ "Instructing", "Learning Strategies", "Science", "Monitoring" ] }, { "slug": "history-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "History Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 47, "median_wage": 83820, "overlap": 78, "skills_to_close": [ "Instructing", "Learning Strategies", "Time Management", "Systems Analysis" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }