COOKED
Tire building is machine-tending on a controlled factory floor: loading beads and plies onto a drum, tending an assembly machine, trimming and stitching, inspecting green tires for blisters and misalignment, and logging counts. The threat here isn't language AI — it's dedicated automation, since a fixed-position, repeatable assembly step is exactly what capital-intensive tire plants have been designing humans out of for two decades, and new plants come online with far fewer builder positions per line. The physical handling and defect-eye keep the job from being pure code, and union contracts slow the pace, but the task set itself offers little that resists a purpose-built machine.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $46,010 → $57,390 -0.2% 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
+2.3% 20,900 → 21,400 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +2.3% 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.
~2,500 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
BufferRecapperRetreaderTire CurerTire LayerTire MakerTire MolderBead BuilderBelt BuilderTire BuilderTire MounterTread BookerTube BuilderTire FinisherTire RecapperTread BuilderTire AssemblerTire RetreaderMold TechnicianTire FabricatorTire TechnicianTire VulcanizerInjection MolderCord Tire Builder
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier At 10 the split is real but lopsided: drum loading, ply splicing, stitching and count logging are already done by automated builders in new plants, while hand-finishing odd sizes, retread and specialty/OTR work, plus catching a blister or off-center bead by feel before the tire goes to cure, are the parts still holding a human on the line — that's mixed, not resistant.
Some physical or field component An 11 reflects that you're lifting beads and ply stock, reaching into a rotating drum, and standing in heat and rubber dust all shift, but the work happens at a fixed station on a climate-monitored floor with the machine, stock racks and travel distances laid out by the plant engineer — nothing like the unpredictable footing of a road crew or a service call.
No licence, no signature requirement A 1 is honest: there's no state builder's licence, no personal certification that follows you between plants, and when a tire fails in the field the recall lands on the manufacturer under NHTSA/TREAD Act reporting, not on the name in the build-code — in-house training and lot traceability are quality controls, not a legal shield for you.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs A 4 credits the real calls you make — scrapping a green tire, flagging a splice that's running open, stopping the machine when stock tracks off — but those decisions run against posted specs, gauge tolerances and a QC escalation path, with the plant's process engineers owning anything ambiguous.
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 (10/20 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 (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (1/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (4/20) 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 6 of this occupation's 27 points (22%).
Embodiment (11/20) 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 37/100 — EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift in retreading/specialty segments: if commodity passenger-tire building fully converts to automated drums, the surviving builder headcount concentrates in low-volume, frequent-changeover work — retread/OTR/agricultural and racing tires, plus prototype builds in R&D tire rooms (e.g. hand-built Goodyear NASCAR and Michelin motorsport tires) where tooling amortization never pencils out. The remaining role is setup, hand ply lay-up and defect judgment rather than cycle-tending.
If plant investment continues shifting to retread and off-the-road/giant tire building — 63-inch mining tires and OTR retreads are still substantially manual because of component mass, curvature and irregular casing geometry — the surviving job is unpredictable-geometry handling on used casings rather than fixed-drum work. Watch OTR retread capacity announcements (Bridgestone, Titan, Kal Tire mining retread plants).
If FMVSS 139 / NHTSA recall exposure pushes plants to formalize a named human sign-off on green-tire disposition — a builder or build-cell operator whose employee stamp is the traceability record for scrap-vs-pass decisions on a casing (already partly present via barcode traceability mandated after the TREAD Act) — the role owns a consequential ambiguous call rather than logging counts.
The limit. Even with every lever, this stays a mid-30s occupation at best: the ceiling is set by headcount, not score. Retread and specialty work can preserve the character of the job for a fraction of the 20,770 while high-volume plants continue coming online with fewer builder positions per line. There is no plausible trust premium — no tire buyer will ever pay extra for a human-built passenger tire outside a few motorsport contracts.
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 740 | $44,570 -22% |
| Fort Wayne, IN | 720 | $51,170 -11% |
| Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA | 310 | $63,060 +10% |
| Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC | 280 | $48,690 -15% |
| Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN | 150 | $46,810 -18% |
| Jackson, MS | 130 | $55,380 -4% |
| Indianapolis-Carmel-Greenwood, IN | 90 | $47,190 -18% |
| Burlington, NC | 40 | $39,720 -31% |
| Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA | 310 | $63,060 +10% |
| Jackson, MS | 130 | $55,380 -4% |
| Fort Wayne, IN | 720 | $51,170 -11% |
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 27. 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.