On 30 September Anthropic published a robot exposure index, with task ratings made using Claude. Robots today can do 74 percent of physical tasks in the US, mostly in controlled settings. They are cheaper than humans for 0.3 percent of tasks, and at the past pace of price declines it will take 40 years to reach 10 percent.
- 74 percent of physical tasks make up 34 percent of US working hours.
- About 80 percent of tasks by working time are exposed to either robots or language models.
- Since 1977, each year robots have become able to do about 2 percent of the physical work they previously could not.
A warehouse packer. By Anthropic's count it is the largest US occupation for which a robot already exists that is cheaper than a person.
About 560 thousand people. Everything else in the study moves more slowly than the headlines about humanoids promise.
The method is as interesting as the findings. The ratings were done by Claude, with search and cited sources, and the data with its reasoning is public. You can check why it decided that digging a trench around buried pipes is beyond today's robots. A model judging when machines will take over human work sounds like a plot. Here at least it has shown its workings.
The bill on the other side: over 50 years, occupations more exposed to robots lost more wages and jobs than the rest. Slow does not mean painless. And slow is the average for everyone. For the packer it is already here. For the taxi driver it is close on cost, and regulation holds it back too.