EXPOSED
Almost nothing in this job is text or screen work — you're reading grain and bedding planes in stone, drilling and wedging by hand, and operating splitters on uneven quarry floors, which language models cannot touch. The real threat isn't AI but capital equipment: hydraulic guillotine splitters, wire saws, and CNC block lines already replace hand-splitting crews, and vision-guided cut optimization is eating the judgment about where to break a block. Small occupation (about 3,300 jobs), no license shield, no customer relationship, so headcount tracks quarry mechanization rather than chatbot capability.
Part 2020 shock, part continued decline in the years since.
Median pay $36,070 → $48,740 +8.1% 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
+4.4% 3,200 → 3,400 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +4.4% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
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.
~400 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
DrillerRockmanRock PickerRock BreakerQuarry WorkerRock SplitterStone BreakerQuarry DrillerStone SplitterSplitter OperatorSandstone SplitterQuarrying SpecialistQuarry Chop Saw OperatorQuarry Plug and Feather Driller
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Setting feather-and-wedge lines along a bedding plane, sounding the block with a hammer to hear where it's sound, and adjusting wedge pressure by feel are physical judgments no software executes — it sits at 15 rather than 18 because CNC block lines and hydraulic guillotines have already absorbed the repetitive dimensional splitting on uniform stone.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You work on a quarry bench with loose spall underfoot, weather, silica dust, and multi-ton blocks that shift when they part — 17 rather than 20 only because the quarry floor is a bounded, surveyed worksite rather than a wholly unpredictable environment like disaster response.
No licence, no signature requirement No state licence gates rock splitting; MSHA Part 46 site training and possibly a powder handler's card are employer-side compliance, so the mine operator eats the citation and nothing in your name protects your headcount.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs You decide where the line goes and when a block is ready to take pressure, but that call is bounded by the cut sheet, the quarry's grain map, and the shift boss's dimension orders, so it's real skill inside someone else's specification rather than an ambiguous high-stakes call you own.
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 (3/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (3/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (6/20) 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 12 of this occupation's 44 points (27%).
Embodiment (17/20) 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.
Pipelayers EXPOSED
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 56/100, still EXPOSED.
Historic preservation work already specifies hand-worked stone: US Secretary of the Interior's Standards and many state SHPO/landmark commission approvals require matching original tooling marks, which machine-sawn faces cannot produce. If more municipal landmark ordinances write hand-split or hand-tooled finish into approved repair specs, buyers are literally paying for human hands
Genuine two-tier structure: repetitive primary breaking is already going to hydraulic splitters and CNC block lines, leaving grain-reading, defect rejection, and hand-wedging of high-value or historic-match blocks. If mechanization completes on the routine tier, the residual job is the judgment tier — stone selection and salvage of flawed blocks
MSHA Part 56 ground-control and highwall-examination duties: if a quarry designates the experienced splitter as the competent person for pre-shift face and loose-rock examination, the role owns a consequential safety call under ambiguity with a documented record
Dimensional stone quarries with irregular, unbenched faces and variable bedding (e.g. Vermont slate, Indiana limestone ledges) resist gantry-mounted guillotine and wire-saw lines that require regular block geometry; if demand shifts further toward reclaimed/heritage stone and small-lot architectural slate, the share of work on terrain no fixed capital line can reach rises
The limit. Ceiling is low and set by capital, not AI. Even with the heritage-work trust premium and an MSHA competent-person role, headcount is governed by quarry mechanization economics; a 3,300-job occupation can shrink to a few hundred specialists whose individual scores rise while the occupation nearly disappears.
| St. Louis, MO-IL | 100 | $60,990 +25% |
| Bloomington, IN | 40 | $49,040 +1% |
| Springfield, MO | 30 | $54,930 +13% |
| St. Louis, MO-IL | 100 | $60,990 +25% |
| Springfield, MO | 30 | $54,930 +13% |
| Bloomington, IN | 40 | $49,040 +1% |
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 44. 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.