EXPOSED
This is a catch-all bucket — commercial equipment techs, amusement ride mechanics, gate and door specialists, sign and fixture installers — and the modal worker spends the day physically diagnosing and fixing machinery in places no robot can navigate: rooftops, back-of-house rooms, customer sites, ladders. AI eats the paperwork around the job (service tickets, parts lookup, warranty forms, diagnostic tree guidance, scheduling and routing) but cannot get a stuck actuator out of a housing or feel that a bearing is going. Weakness is the shield: most of these titles have no license requirement and no personal sign-off liability, so nothing legally reserves the work for a human.
Dipped in 2020, then grew past where it started.
Median pay $39,830 → $49,230 -1.1% 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
+2.4%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 176,300 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +2.4% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 62/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
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.
~21,500 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
CooperArmorerBeltmanJet ManCoopererGunsmithMechanicRepairerCaretakerInstallerRepairmanRepatcherShipsmithToolsmithAnglesmithAnvilsmithBlacksmithCare TakerGroundsmanGun FitterGun TesterJet WorkerRecoopererTub Mender
The BLS uses Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Pulling a seized actuator, re-tensioning a gate chain, or replacing a bearing in a walk-in cooler compressor are irreducibly manual sequences where the fault is found by feel and sound before a part number ever gets typed, so only the ticket-writing and parts-lookup layer digitises — that mix of near-total manual core with a real clerical tail is what holds it at 16 rather than 19.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments The work happens on rooftops, in crawl spaces, on ladders over customer floors, at amusement ride understructures and loading docks — unmapped, weather-exposed, cluttered sites reached by van with no fixture, jig, or repeatable approach, which is why this sits at 18 and not in the low teens where a controlled shop bay would put it.
Certification preferred, not legally required Most titles in this bucket — sign installers, gate and door techs, commercial equipment servicers — need no state license and no personal signature on a certificate; the 5 rather than 0 reflects that manufacturer factory certifications, elevator/ride-inspection adjacencies, and OSHA fall-protection or forklift cards do gate some assignments and specific accounts.
Meaningful discretion Deciding whether to red-tag a ride or a rolling steel door, repair versus condemn a $30k piece of commercial equipment, or run a partial fix through a weekend service is discretion with real consequence, though most calls end up defended against a manufacturer service manual and a supervisor's approval rather than owned outright — hence 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 (16/20 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 (5/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (11/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (12/20) 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 28 of this occupation's 62 points (45%).
Embodiment (18/20) 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 79/100 — SAFE.
Insurer-driven rather than statutory: carriers writing commercial property or amusement liability requiring a named certified technician's inspection record as a condition of coverage or claim payment — visible already in elevator/escalator and boiler lines, and in venue insurance after ride litigation
Task-mix shift as AI absorbs the paperwork tier: if diagnostic trees, parts lookup, warranty filing, and routing are fully handled by vendor AI, the residual day is non-routine physical fault isolation on undocumented, modified, or obsolete equipment — the tier with no manual to consult. This raises the share of the day AI cannot do without raising headcount, and shows up as fewer techs each doing harder work
Manufacturer authorized-servicer programs that void warranty unless a factory-trained named human performs the work — already standard in commercial kitchen, gaming, and dock equipment. Expansion, plus right-to-repair fights that make OEM authorization more valuable, keeps buyers paying for a specific credentialed person
State adoption of ASTM F24 / F770 amusement ride inspection regimes that name a specific certified individual (e.g., NAARSO/AIMS Level II inspector) as the person who signs the annual ride-ready certificate and carries personal liability — already the pattern in NJ, PA, and CA ride inspection codes; extension of that named-signer model to automatic gates/barriers (ASTM F2200 + UL 325 compliance certification after fatal gate incidents) and to commercial door/dock equipment would push a large slice of this bucket from unlicensed to signature-bearing
Codified condemn/return-to-service authority — the tech, not the owner, decides a ride, gate, or lift stays out of service, with that call documented and defensible. Where inspection codes give an inspector authority to tag equipment out of service (as several state ride codes and OSHA lockout/tagout practice do), the role owns a consequential call under ambiguity rather than executing an owner's instruction
The limit. The bucket is heterogeneous, so no single lever moves all 176k workers: ride mechanics and gate techs have a real path to a named-signer shield, while sign installers and fixture techs likely have none and would stay unlicensed. Aggregate movement is limited by the fact that liability shields attach to hazard classes (public safety, entrapment, crush risk), not to occupation titles.
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 8,770 | $51,240 +4% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 6,080 | $53,940 +10% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 5,300 | $45,430 -8% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 4,470 | $49,610 +1% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 4,350 | $46,860 -5% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 4,290 | $46,760 -5% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 3,450 | $56,900 +16% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 3,140 | $51,060 +4% |
| Bremerton-Silverdale-Port Orchard, WA | 1,320 | $80,390 +63% |
| Anchorage, AK | 40 | $77,690 +58% |
| Urban Honolulu, HI | 870 | $77,560 +58% |
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 62. 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.