COOKED
The core of this job — keying text from drafts or dictation, formatting reports and correspondence, applying templates and styles, proofreading for spelling and grammar — is precisely what speech-to-text and generative models already do at production quality and near-zero marginal cost. There is no licensure, no physical component beyond sitting at a keyboard, and no client who is paying for this specific person's presence. Employment has already fallen by roughly 90% from its 1990s peak, and the remaining 35,000 jobs are largely in legal, medical, and government offices where formatting rules and records handling are still tolerated as human work.
Core tasks are already automatable. Transcribing dictation, keying text into templates, applying styles and running spell-check are tasks where Whisper-class ASR and off-the-shelf document automation already hit or beat human accuracy per page, which is why this sits at 2 rather than 7 — even the residual work of merging revisions and building tables of contents is native software functionality, not a human judgment gap.
Fully desk- and screen-based. Sitting at a workstation with a keyboard, headset, and occasionally a scanner or copier is the whole physical footprint; the 2 rather than 0 acknowledges retrieving paper files and stuffing envelopes in legal and clinical offices, not any task requiring hands in an uncontrolled space.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no state licence, no certification board, and no signature line — a typo in a deposition transcript or discharge summary comes back on the attorney or clinician who signed it, and employers can and do route the same work to an offshore vendor or an ASR pipeline with no credentialing barrier.
Anonymous artifact production. The output is a clean document that carries the author's name, not yours; the 2 reflects that long-tenured typists in a small law or clinic office get kept for knowing the firm's house style and where the old files are, which is institutional memory rather than a relationship a client is paying to preserve.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. Deciding whether an inaudible passage gets bracketed, which template applies to a motion, or whether to query the dictator on an ambiguous drug name is real but bounded discretion inside a style manual, and every substantive call escalates to the originating attorney or physician — that keeps it at 2 rather than 7.
Has AI actually changed your work?