AI-controlled robots will not replace bench scientists soon, but AI systems are already taking work from human data analysts and research coders. Credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty
Artificial intelligence is threatening many jobs, and those in science seem unlikely to be exempt. So which jobs are most at risk?
Seeking answers, Nature spoke to more than four dozen researchers across academia and industry who use AI in their work. Many of them say that AI’s ascendance is already reducing demand for human researchers who can write code or do basic data analysis – tasks often handled by graduate students, postdocs or those without graduate training.
Obsolescence of some basic roles in areas such as computer modelling “is not even in the future. It’s happening now,” says Xuanhe Zhao, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, because “AI is doing this much better than entry-level scientists”. Workers in some science-adjacent jobs, such as translating papers from one language to another, are also seeing their careers slip away.
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Researchers tend to think that positions involving hands-on experimentation are safer, as are the jobs of senior scientists who organize and coordinate research projects. But a few argue that AI is catching up with humans, even on these higher-level functions.
Jobs involving “purely cognitive tasks will be first” to go, says Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “Traditionally, these are the jobs that were most closely associated with scientific research,” he says. “They will shortly be taken over by AI.”
Disruptive force
Researchers are already using AI tools for many tasks, such as editing papers and summarizing literature. But at the moment, AI’s ability to generate code and process data is most disruptive to the scientific job market, researchers say.
For example, some academic laboratories employ research programmers to write packages of code that other scientists use. With the advent of AI, such jobs “are now obsolete”, says Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford University in California. Positions that focus on creating simulations and analysing data can now be filled with AI, agrees Zhao.
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