Robots can carry out three-quarters of physical tasks, but are only cost-effective for 0.3 per cent of them

Anthropic has published a robot exposure index: at the historical rate of price falls, it would take forty years for robots to become competitive in 10 per cent of tasks.

Anthropic has sifted through the 19,000 or so tasks of the 900 jobs identified by the American database O*NET to measure what robots could actually do. The verdict: they are technically capable of performing 74% of physical tasks, or 34% of all hours worked in the United States — but most often in highly controlled environments such as the factory or warehouse. Above all, they are now only cheaper than a human for 0.3% of tasks. With a price drop of 3% per year, as in the past, it would take about forty years to reach 10%.

Technical, regulatory and cultural obstacles

Cost is not the only obstacle: 70% of physical tasks come up against capacity limits, with fine handling in the lead, 14% on regulations and 25% on people's preferences. Vehicles dominate the ranking of exposed occupations — nine of the top ten are drivers, led by taxi drivers — even if a robotaxi is still estimated to be about $7,000 more than a human driver. Packers, nearly 560,000 people, form the largest contingent already exposed to profitable robots.

The most exposed workers are more often men, much less educated and earn about $30 an hour less; over fifty years, their jobs have experienced more pronounced declines in wages and employment. Combined with language models, robots would account for about 81% of employment. In the central scenario, half of the physical work would only become profitable to automate in 2085, in 2050 in an accelerated scenario.