What I mean is that because the nature of workplace activities or the skills you would need to perform one job compared to another are so particular and so diverse, it's been difficult to find data that reflects all this variability, so researchers have relied on just heuristics. For example, if you get a college degree, you don't have to worry about automation.
What's interesting about generative AI is that it's doing work that would have been assumed to be safe from automation just a few years ago. That means there are new parts of the economy—in particular, high-skilled, white-collar jobs—where generative AI is doing some of the workplace activities we would expect from these workers. That is something new.