{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/physicists/", "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": "Physicists", "soc_code": "19-2012", "category": "Science", "us_employment": 20430, "median_annual_wage": 172250 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 46, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 11, "embodiment": 9, "liability_shield": 5, "trust_premium": 7, "judgment_accountability": 14 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "An 11 reflects the split inside the actual job: the analysis pipeline, Monte Carlo work, Mathematica derivations, and manuscript drafting that fill most of a computational or theory physicist's week are already being done at usable quality by models, while aligning an optics bench, chasing a vacuum leak, commissioning a beamline shift, or judging that a 3-sigma bump is a bad calibration run has no digital substitute — enough irreplaceable work to keep it out of the single digits, not enough to reach the mid-teens where wet-lab and field scientists sit.", "embodiment": "A 9 puts physicists above pure desk work because cryostat assembly, detector installation, cleanroom fabrication, and accelerator hall access are real hands-on hours, but the environments are controlled — a temperature-stabilised lab or a shielded vault, not a rig floor or a storm — and a substantial fraction of the occupation (theorists, HEP analysts, modelers) never touches hardware at all.", "liability_shield": "A 5 is the weighted reality: the PhD is a hiring credential with no licensing statute behind it, and only the medical physics slice carries ABR board certification plus state radiation-machine registration where a treatment-plan error lands on a named individual — that minority is what lifts the score off the floor rather than any protection covering the beamline or condensed-matter physicist.", "trust_premium": "A 7 recognises that program managers at DOE and NSF fund people they know and that industrial R&D clients keep a specific physicist on a problem for years, but the deliverable is a validated result, a working instrument, or a peer-reviewed paper that stands or falls on reproducibility — the referees are anonymous and the data does not care who took it.", "judgment_accountability": "A 14 is earned by calls that no procedure covers: declaring a measurement publishable, setting the systematic error budget that determines whether a discovery claim survives, deciding a novel apparatus is safe to energise, and in the clinical case approving a dose distribution that will be delivered to a patient — decisions where being wrong costs a retraction, a destroyed multi-million-dollar instrument, or a radiation injury." }, "rationale": "A large share of a physicist's week — literature review, simulation and analysis code, fitting models to data, drafting papers and grant text — is exactly what current AI does at usable quality, and computational/theory work is where that bite is deepest. What resists is designing an experiment that has never been run, building and debugging real apparatus (cryostats, beamlines, optics benches, detectors), and deciding which anomaly is physics versus instrument artifact. Modal employment is national-lab, federal, and industrial R&D; medical physicists inside this bucket carry board certification and radiation-safety accountability that most other physicists do not.", "outlook": "Physics headcount stays small and roughly flat, but the theory/computation tier compresses hardest as AI absorbs modeling and analysis, while experimentalists, instrument builders, and certified medical physicists hold their ground.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "State licensure of medical physicists (bills already enacted in TX, FL, NY, HI and pushed by AAPM) extended to more states, plus an ACR–AAPM practice parameter or NRC rule requiring a named Qualified Medical Physicist to personally review and sign AI-generated treatment plans, auto-contours and machine QA reports. Also watch NRC/state radiation-safety rules naming an individual Radiation Safety Officer accountable for AI-assisted dosimetry.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 5 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Funder and journal rules that place non-delegable responsibility on a named human for AI-produced content: NSF's and NIH's prohibition on generative AI in peer review, NIH's 2025 policy limiting AI-generated applications, and DOE lab research-integrity procedures requiring a named principal investigator to attest that simulation/analysis outputs were independently verified. If audit-with-personal-attestation becomes standard for computational results, the calls under ambiguity concentrate in the PI role.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Genuine two-tier structure: if literature synthesis, fitting, code, and draft text are absorbed, the residual week is experiment design never run before, discriminating true anomaly from instrument artifact, and choosing which systematic to chase — the tier where verification cost exceeds generation cost. Measurable signal: national-lab staffing shifting from analysis FTEs toward instrumentation/commissioning roles at facilities like LCLS-II, EIC, or fusion pilot programs.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "Growth in the share of physicist headcount attached to apparatus that cannot be simulated away — beamline commissioning, dilution-refrigerator and qubit-fab work in the national quantum initiative centers, ITER/SPARC diagnostics, detector installation. This is a composition shift within the SOC, not a change in the work itself; it only raises the score if hiring actually tilts that way.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Narrow route only: classified and export-controlled work (DOE Q clearance, ITAR-covered defense physics) where the buyer requires a cleared human to hold and interpret the data, and cloud AI tools are prohibited on the network. This is a security requirement rather than a preference for human authorship, so it is a floor rather than a premium.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "Outside medical physics and radiation safety, there is no licensure body that could plausibly require a physicist's personal signature — no client pays for a human-derived cross-section or human-written simulation as such. Liability shield and trust premium for the theory/computational majority of this SOC have no realistic route upward; the durable gains sit in task-mix and in apparatus-attached roles." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 16710, "wage": 118830 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 17620, "wage": 120950 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 16730, "wage": 122850 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 16160, "wage": 129850 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 20020, "wage": 152430 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 18840, "wage": 142850 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 18350, "wage": 155680 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 21340, "wage": 166290 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 20430, "wage": 172250 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 22.3, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }