COOKED
The job is compiling data from surveys and records, cleaning and coding it, running prescribed statistical computations, and building tables and charts for someone else to interpret — which is precisely the work current AI plus modern scripting already does at usable quality. There is no license, no signature, and no client relationship; the statistician or researcher above you owns the interpretation and the accountability. The surviving fragment is data acquisition and quality judgment in messy institutional settings — knowing which source is trustworthy, why a field is broken, how a survey instrument distorts responses.
Core tasks are already automatable. Recoding open-ended survey responses into category codes, deduplicating respondent records, running the prescribed regression or weighting procedure in SAS/R/SPSS, and formatting the output into tables are each tasks an LLM plus a scripting pass now completes end-to-end; the 4 rather than 0 reflects the residual chasing of missing questionnaires, reconciling a field office's spreadsheet against the master file, and noticing that a variable's coding changed between collection waves.
Fully desk- and screen-based. The only physical elements are retrieving paper questionnaires or archived record files and occasionally operating scanning or data-entry equipment; everything else happens at one workstation, which is why this sits at 2 rather than 0.
No licence, no signature requirement. No state licence, no certification exam, no signature block — an ASA accreditation exists for statisticians and is neither required nor typically held at assistant level, and any error you introduce into a dataset is caught and owned by the statistician who signs the report.
Anonymous artifact production. Your outputs reach internal researchers, program staff, or a supervising statistician who judge the tables on whether the numbers reconcile, not on who produced them; the 3 covers the practical fact that a colleague who knows your files trusts your cleaning conventions and will ask you rather than re-derive them.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. Codebooks, survey specifications, and imputation rules set in advance dictate almost every call you make; the discretion at 4 is deciding whether a suspicious outlier is a real value or a keying error, and whether a response rate is low enough to flag upward — decisions someone else then ratifies.
Financial Specialists, All Other EXPOSED
Data Scientists EXPOSED
Economists EXPOSED
Has AI actually changed your work?