The machine is climbing the ladder
Picture every job in America on a ladder, from the lowest-paid at the bottom to the best-paid at the top. For 175 years, machines took jobs near the bottom and people climbed up. Now the machine is climbing too.
Tap, slide and click your way through six pictures. Every number comes from the study AI automation climbs the pay ladder (Bojić, 2026).
Where 30 American workers stood
Slide through the years. Each figure is one in 30 workers, placed on the floor of the ladder where their job sat in 1950's pay ranking.
Where on the ladder did each machine strike?
Click a machine. It jumps to the rung where the work it took (or can take) sits on the pay ladder. The dashed person shows the average worker of that time.
Jobs don't fade slowly. They hold, then drop.
Every job is a bundle of tasks. Fill the bucket with the share of a job a machine could do. In the computer era, jobs stayed steady until about 30% of their work could be automated. Past that line, they spilled over and shrank.
What really happened, 1980 to 2019
Change in each group's share of all US jobs. 301 occupations, grouped by how much of their work computers and machines could do.
How close is each job to the line?
How much of each job's work AI could take once fully adopted. The black tick is the 30% line. Switch on robots to add physical work.
AI turns the old pattern upside down
Out of every 10 workers in each pay group, how many are in jobs past the 30% line? Compare computers with AI.
Young workers feel it first
Monthly job surveys, from late 2022 (when ChatGPT arrived) to September 2026. Share of each age group working in jobs that AI pushes past the line.
Young workers' employment in the most AI-exposed jobs, for each step up in exposure, after 2022.
Older workers barely moved. Companies seem to hire fewer beginners rather than fire people. This signal is early and still uncertain.
How much human work will we still need?
To make everything the US makes today. Pick a future, then slide the year. Each figure is 1% of today's work hours.