{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/word-processors-and-typists/",
  "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": "Word Processors and Typists",
    "soc_code": "43-9022",
    "category": "Office",
    "us_employment": 35010,
    "median_annual_wage": 49280
  },
  "verdict": "COOKED",
  "risk_resistance": 8,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 2,
    "embodiment": 2,
    "liability_shield": 0,
    "trust_premium": 2,
    "judgment_accountability": 2
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "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.",
    "embodiment": "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.",
    "liability_shield": "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.",
    "trust_premium": "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.",
    "judgment_accountability": "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."
  },
  "rationale": "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.",
  "outlook": "By 2035 this SOC code will likely be a rounding error, with the surviving work absorbed into administrative assistant, records clerk, and transcript-verification roles.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift within the surviving legal/medical/court niche: if ASR handles the raw keying, the remaining work concentrates in certified transcript preparation to court-specific format (e.g., federal court transcript format rules, AAERT CET-style verbatim standards), redaction of PII/PHI under HIPAA and FRCP 5.2, and speaker attribution in multi-party audio — tasks where error is consequential and current ASR degrades on crosstalk and accents. This is a genuine two-tier occupation; the judgment tier is small but real.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Court rules or state statutes requiring that a transcript entered into the record be certified by a human transcriptionist/reporter attesting to accuracy — already the norm for court reporters (many states bar AI-only certified transcripts), and could be extended by judicial council rule to transcript-prep staff handling recorded proceedings (as in states using electronic recording plus certified transcribers).",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Health-system or state rules requiring a credentialed medical transcriptionist/editor (AHDI CHDS/RHDS) to review and sign off on AI-drafted clinical documentation before it enters the legal medical record, driven by malpractice-insurer requirements after documented ambient-scribe hallucination incidents (Whisper hallucination findings in clinical audio, 2024).",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Buyer-side rules against sending sensitive audio to cloud AI — classified, grand jury, sealed family-court, or attorney-client material handled under protective order — sustaining a small paid-for-human-only segment; visible today in government contracts specifying US-person, cleared transcriptionists.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Role redefinition to AI-output verifier of record: if the transcriptionist is named as the person attesting to accuracy of an AI-generated transcript or clinical note, they own the call on ambiguous audio and on what gets redacted, with discoverable consequences.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Even with every lever, this tops out in the low 20s and only for the fraction of the 35,010 sitting in courts, hospitals, and cleared government work. The generic office typist has no route; the credentialed niche is a different job with a different title, and headcount there is already small and shrinking."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 65200,
        "wage": 39740
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 53130,
        "wage": 39750
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 47460,
        "wage": 40340
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 42920,
        "wage": 41050
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 41930,
        "wage": 44030
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 41990,
        "wage": 44330
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 37200,
        "wage": 46450
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 36030,
        "wage": 47850
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 35010,
        "wage": 49280
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": -46.3,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [
    {
      "slug": "court-reporters-and-simultaneous-captioners",
      "title": "Court Reporters and Simultaneous Captioners",
      "verdict": "EXPOSED",
      "risk_resistance": 34,
      "median_wage": 72420,
      "overlap": 79,
      "skills_to_close": [
        "Active Listening"
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "tax-examiners-and-collectors-and-revenue-agents",
      "title": "Tax Examiners and Collectors, and Revenue Agents",
      "verdict": "EXPOSED",
      "risk_resistance": 34,
      "median_wage": 62370,
      "overlap": 51,
      "skills_to_close": [
        "Critical Thinking",
        "Instructing",
        "Active Learning",
        "Complex Problem Solving"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}