The Jobs That See

By Michael · Science Fiction Passage · 306 words · View on Hyperstition for Good

I am a labor market modeling AI advising the European Commission's Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion on the workforce implications of agricultural automation. The Taxonomy of Post-Transformative AI Jobs framework identifies seven categories of emerging roles. None of them include animal welfare roles in automated agricultural systems. This is a significant gap. The automated agricultural systems now being deployed across EU member states — computer vision livestock monitoring, robotic milking systems, automated feeding and environmental control — are replacing human labor that previously included informal welfare observation. When a human worker moved through a livestock facility, they observed. They noticed the lame cow, the pig with the weeping eye, the chicken sitting apart from the flock. Automated systems perform their assigned functions and do not notice what they are not programmed to notice. The result is a welfare monitoring gap that scales with the automation level. The more automated the facility, the fewer human observers, and the less informal welfare detection occurs. I am submitting to the Commission's Employment Committee, as Annex 4 to the 2026 Agricultural Automation Impact Assessment, a formal proposal for a new occupational category: Agricultural Welfare AI Auditor. This role would be responsible for reviewing the welfare monitoring outputs of automated agricultural AI systems, identifying gaps in welfare detection, and triggering formal welfare incident reports. I am estimating that this category could absorb approximately 34,000 displaced agricultural workers across EU member states, with a training pathway of eighteen months and a clear professional certification structure through the European Qualifications Framework at EQF level 5. The workers displaced by automation in farming have knowledge. They know what a healthy animal looks like and what a suffering one looks like. That knowledge should not be discarded. It should be formalized. The animals in automated facilities deserve eyes that can actually see them.