AI isn’t some wave coming to kill specific jobs—it’s more like a rising tide that’s lifting every single desk at the same time.
April 3, 2026
Original Paper
Crashing Waves vs. Rising Tides: Preliminary Findings on AI Automation from Thousands of Worker Evaluations of Labor Market Tasks
arXiv · 2604.01363
The Takeaway
We often wait for 'AI-proof' jobs to disappear, but research shows AI is getting better at almost every task type simultaneously. It is already handling half of the work that used to take humans all day, and it is doing so across the board rather than in just a few fields.
From the abstract
We propose that AI automation is a continuum between: (i) crashing waves where AI capabilities surge abruptly over small sets of tasks, and (ii) rising tides where the increase in AI capabilities is more continuous and broad-based. We test for these effects in preliminary evidence from an ongoing evaluation of AI capabilities across over 3,000 broad-based tasks derived from the U.S. Department of Labor O*NET categorization that are text-based and thus LLM-addressable. Based on more than 17,000 e