Welcome back to The AI Shift, our weekly dive beneath the surface of the AI and jobs story. We’ve written before — with a somewhat sceptical eye — about how economists produce their splashy estimates of which jobs are “exposed” to AI disruption. Today we’re going one step deeper: who (or, more to the point, what) actually decides whether AI is capable of performing an individual task? And how consistent are those assessments?

John writes

Over the past year or two, dozens of headline-making studies have made claims about whether or not we are on the brink of a white-collar jobs wipeout, whether AI is already eating graduate jobs, and so on. Away from the headlines is the small detail that the vast majority of those studies have been underpinned by a single set of scores for how exposed particular jobs are to AI. And deeper still in the footnotes is how those exposure scores are determined.