SAFE
Piloting a dive boat, water taxi, tour launch, or research skiff means reading wind, chop, wakes, and crowded channels in real time while handling lines, engines, and passengers — none of that is screen work. USCG licensing (OUPV/Master, drug testing, tonnage endorsements) puts a named human legally responsible for the vessel and everyone aboard, and small-craft autonomy is nowhere near handling docking in current, or pulling a swimmer out of the water. The automatable slice is the paperwork: logs, manifests, fuel and maintenance records, trip scheduling, weather briefs.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $48,260 → $47,520 -21.2% 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
+1.4% 2,700 → 2,800 on the projections basis
Hard to automate, and growing
The work resists current AI and the BLS projects +1.4% more of these jobs by 2034. Note that safe does not mean well paid — several of the fastest-growing resistant occupations are among the lowest paid on the register.
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.
~300 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
BoatmanLaunchmanBoat DriverBoat PersonRiver PilotHarbor PilotBoat OperatorLaunch StewardMooring MasterLaunch OperatorShoreboat DriverSpeedboat DriverTowboat OperatorCrew Boat OperatorMotorboat OperatorSpeedboat OperatorWater Taxi OperatorBoat Launch OperatorWater Taxi Boat MateRiver and Lakes BoatmanRivers and Lakes LevermanWater Taxi Ferry OperatorOutboard Motorboat OperatorWater Taxi Business Operator
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Docking a 40-foot launch in a 2-knot cross-current with fenders out and a bow line in your hand, spotting a diver's bubbles before you go into gear, and judging whether today's 3-foot chop makes the inlet crossing a bad idea are all tasks with no digitized substitute — the 15 rather than 18 reflects that route planning, weather briefs, and the trip log genuinely have moved onto tablets.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You are outdoors on a moving deck in whatever the weather does, handling lines and cleats, clearing a fouled prop, restarting a flooded outboard, helping passengers over a gunwale in swell — the environment is uncontrolled in every axis, which is as close to the ceiling as any job gets.
Licensed human required and personally liable A USCG OUPV or Master's licence names you personally, subjects you to random drug and alcohol testing under 46 CFR Part 16, and makes you the master answerable for the vessel and every soul aboard in a marine casualty investigation — the 14 rather than 18 is because the OUPV is a relatively accessible ticket and the operating company usually carries the insurance and the deeper pockets.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls The go/no-go call on marginal weather, the decision to abort a crossing with paying passengers grumbling, and how you handle a man-overboard or an engine failure offshore are yours alone with no one to phone — the 14 sits at the bottom of that band because collision regs, licensed carrying capacity, and company SOPs frame most routine decisions.
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 (15/20 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 (14/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (10/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (14/20) 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 38 of this occupation's 72 points (53%).
Embodiment (19/20) 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 85/100, still SAFE.
Marine P&I insurers (e.g. through AWO/Passenger Vessel Association-negotiated hull and liability terms) writing named-licensed-operator-aboard clauses as a condition of coverage for dive, tour, and water taxi hulls, voiding cover for uncrewed or remote operation.
State dive-operator statutes or NAUI/PADI/DAN-driven charter standards naming the vessel operator as the accountable party for dive-site suitability and surface-support decisions (following NTSB's post-Conception recommendations on roving watch and master's responsibilities, adopted in the 2022 Small Passenger Vessel Safety Act).
If logs, manifests, fuel records and CG-required documentation are absorbed by digital compliance tools, the measured remaining work is the unautomatable handling and passenger tier — the automatable slice shrinks to near zero rather than the job shrinking.
USCG rulemaking on autonomous/remotely-operated small passenger vessels that explicitly requires a licensed Master or OUPV physically aboard any vessel carrying passengers for hire, rather than allowing a remote operator — the direction already signaled in USCG's Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship policy work and IMO's MASS Code development (target 2028 non-mandatory / 2032 mandatory). A carve-out that keeps 46 CFR Subchapter T inspected small passenger vessels crew-aboard would lock the shield in.
Task-mix shift: if ECDIS-style route planning, collision-avoidance alerting, and weather routing become standard on small craft, the residual role concentrates on the calls autonomy cannot own — go/no-go in building seas, man-overboard recovery, deciding to abort a dive, crowd control in a grounding. The remaining day is almost entirely consequential ambiguity.
The limit. Already 72 with embodiment near max; realistic headroom is a few points in liability and judgment. Trust premium has no plausible route — tour and taxi passengers buy the trip, not the human at the wheel, and no visible market segment charges for a human operator as such. Note also that the true risk to this occupation is demand-side (fewer charters, fleet consolidation), which none of these levers touch.
| San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR | 140 | $26,630 -44% |
| Urban Honolulu, HI | 140 | $81,440 +71% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 80 | $34,510 -27% |
| Kahului-Wailuku, HI | 70 | $83,390 +75% |
| New Orleans-Metairie, LA | 70 | $49,230 +4% |
| Barnstable Town, MA | 60 | $45,160 -5% |
| Beaumont-Port Arthur, TX | 50 | $60,920 +28% |
| Corpus Christi, TX | 50 | $43,230 -9% |
| Kahului-Wailuku, HI | 70 | $83,390 +75% |
| Urban Honolulu, HI | 140 | $81,440 +71% |
| Beaumont-Port Arthur, TX | 50 | $60,920 +28% |
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 72. 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.