"The Rising Tide"
The question of how AI automation displaces work has two competing metaphors. Crashing waves: sudden capability surges on narrow task sets, disrupting specific professions while leaving others untouched. Rising tides: gradual, broad-based improvement across nearly everything, lifting capability uniformly.
Seventeen thousand worker evaluations across three thousand labor market tasks support the rising tide. AI currently completes tasks requiring three to four human hours at roughly 50% success, improving to about 65% within eighteen months. The improvement isn't concentrated in a few domains โ it spreads across the full range of text-based occupational tasks.
The projection: if current trends persist, 80 to 95 percent success on most text-based tasks by 2029. But "if current trends persist" carries enormous uncertainty. Capability curves plateau. Economic adoption lags technical capability by years or decades. Regulatory responses change incentive structures. The projection is a straight line on a trajectory that won't stay straight.
What the data does establish is the breadth. Prior analyses identified narrow task categories where AI excels and predicted targeted disruption. The worker evaluations show something different โ moderate capability across nearly everything, improving everywhere simultaneously. No occupation is immune because no occupation consists entirely of tasks AI can't partially perform.
The distinction between metaphors matters for policy. Crashing waves suggest targeted retraining: identify the affected occupations and redirect those workers. Rising tides suggest structural adaptation: every occupation changes, no clear safe harbor exists, and the response has to be systemic rather than targeted. The data points toward tides.
