{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/machine-feeders-and-offbearers/", "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": "Machine Feeders and Offbearers", "soc_code": "53-7063", "category": "Transportation", "us_employment": 42330, "median_annual_wage": 41220 }, "verdict": "COOKED", "risk_resistance": 23, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 8, "embodiment": 10, "liability_shield": 1, "trust_premium": 1, "judgment_accountability": 3 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Feeding blanks and clearing finished parts is repetitive material handling on a fixed cycle, which robotic arms already do at production cost, so the 8 reflects only the surviving human-held work — jam clearing, unjamming a misfed sheet, re-orienting an odd blank, and handling changeover-heavy short runs where fixturing a robot costs more than the part.", "embodiment": "You are on your feet on a plant floor lifting, stacking, and reaching into machine envelopes all shift, which puts this above any desk role, but the environment is a known bay with fixed machine positions, guarding, and pallet locations rather than a construction site or a customer's basement — hence 10, not the high teens.", "liability_shield": "No licence, certificate, or apprenticeship gates this work; you're hired on general safety orientation and lockout/tagout training, and any injury or defect claim runs to the employer under OSHA and workers' comp, not to you personally.", "trust_premium": "Parts leave the department stamped and counted with no name attached; nobody downstream requests you specifically, and a temp agency can staff the station tomorrow with no customer noticing.", "judgment_accountability": "Your decisions are bounded by the setup sheet and the machine's cycle — feed rate, scrap the obvious short shot, hit the e-stop, call the setter — and the 3 exists only because when to stop the press and flag a run is genuinely yours to call in the moment." }, "rationale": "The core of this job — loading blanks into presses, offbearing finished parts onto conveyors, stacking, and visually spotting obvious defects — happens in a fixed, controlled plant environment with predictable part geometry, which is exactly where pick-and-place robots, cobot machine tenders, and vision inspection systems already work at production cost. The moat is not AI capability but capital budgets and short production runs: small shops with frequent changeovers keep humans because the payback math doesn't close. Nothing about the role requires licensure, a customer relationship, or ownership of ambiguous decisions, so there is no non-physical shield.", "outlook": "Employment keeps eroding as vision-guided pick-and-place gets cheaper; the surviving jobs will be in small high-mix shops and in tending the automation that replaced the feeding work.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "Shift of remaining human-fed lines toward deformable or highly variable feedstock — poultry/meat portions, hides, textiles, sand-cast parts with flash and scale, mixed-grade recycled stock — where part geometry is not repeatable and vision-guided pick-and-place still fails on grasp. Visible already in poultry deboning and apparel cut-part handling, where USDA/industry automation pilots have repeatedly stalled on soft-tissue variability.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift within the role: if cobot machine tenders take the steady-state feeding on long runs, what remains for the human is changeover, fixture swap, jam clearing, first-article checking and scrap triage on short runs. This occupation does have a thin second tier (the job-shop feeder who also sets up), and in high-mix shops that tier is what is left. Watch for job postings retitled 'machine tender/setup' at the same wage band.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Formal assignment of in-process quality hold authority to the line operator under an AS9100 / IATF 16949 / ISO 13485 quality system — i.e. the feeder is the named person of record who can stop the line and quarantine a lot, with signature on the traveler. Some aerospace and medical-device suppliers already do this to satisfy customer audits; where the signature is a person rather than a station, the role owns a consequential call.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "A narrow route only: if OSHA's long-pending update to the machine guarding standard (29 CFR 1910 Subpart O, on the regulatory agenda since the 2019 robotics RFI) or a state analogue requires a trained, designated human 'authorized employee' physically present for lockout/tagout and for entry into a collaborative robot's operating space during jam clearing, the presence requirement becomes a rule rather than a preference. This shields presence, not the loading task itself, and confers no license or personal liability.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "No plausible route to trust_premium: the buyer of a stamped bracket or a bagged part cannot see who loaded the press and has never paid extra for it. Even with every lever above, this stays in the low 30s — the levers protect presence and hold authority in high-mix and soft-material plants, not the feeding motion, and the underlying trend is that capital cost of cobot tenders keeps falling into the short-run payback window." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 74350, "wage": 28510 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 66380, "wage": 29560 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 63280, "wage": 31180 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 64240, "wage": 33000 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 60880, "wage": 37010 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 51010, "wage": 38040 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 44500, "wage": 39250 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 46690, "wage": 39700 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 42330, "wage": 41220 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -43.1, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "welders-cutters-solderers-and-brazers", "title": "Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 62, "median_wage": 53750, "overlap": 84, "skills_to_close": [ "Equipment Selection", "Systems Analysis", "Complex Problem Solving", "Installation" ] }, { "slug": "cutting-punching-and-press-machine-setters-operators-and-tenders-metal-and-plastic", "title": "Cutting, Punching, and Press Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 37, "median_wage": 46330, "overlap": 83, "skills_to_close": [ "Equipment Maintenance", "Repairing", "Operation and Control", "Active Learning" ] }, { "slug": "cleaning-washing-and-metal-pickling-equipment-operators-and-tenders", "title": "Cleaning, Washing, and Metal Pickling Equipment Operators and Tenders", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 42, "median_wage": 43530, "overlap": 81, "skills_to_close": [ "Operation and Control", "Complex Problem Solving" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }