• Question: Is your job either threatened or aided by AI?

    Asked by camo532abas58 on 18 Feb 2026.
    • Photo: Amrit Phull

      Amrit Phull answered on 18 Feb 2026:

      My job can sometimes be aided by AI, but I don’t use it very much. I’m conscious that AI has a big impact on the climate as it uses a lot of water. AI can be really useful for coding or other similar tasks, but a lot of Engineering is about physical systems. It takes more time to explain these to AI and make sure that AI understands, than for me to use my own intelligence and work it out myself. I’m a big believer in not overusing AI when it isn’t needed 🙂

    • Photo: Andrew McDowall

      Andrew McDowall answered on 19 Feb 2026:

      At the moment, mostly aided. Perhaps that will change in future. There’s two areas it’s proving quite useful – one is in finding relevant papers and other sources of information, there’s an awful lot of scientific journals published and ways of describing the same things. AI is quite useful at searching these and making suggestions for papers that I might have missed or taken a long time to find otherwise.
      The other area I’m finding it quite useful is in analysing large quantities of rather poor quality data . I’ve far too much of that and trying to work out whats signal and what’s noise is challenging.

      The main problem is the difficulty in not automatically believing the AI. Everything it comes up with needs to be checked and confirmed separately to ensure the result is real, but it’s so convincing and speaks with such authority, it’s hard to resist some days.

    • Photo: Georgia Rowe

      Georgia Rowe answered on 19 Feb 2026:

      My job can be aided by AI. For example, I sometimes use AI to help me write code. There is some research into using AI to generate new material structures, but I do not think it will ever be good enough to completely replace a chemist.

    • Photo: Jenny Power

      Jenny Power answered on 19 Feb 2026:

      This is an interesting question! I am a research mathematician, so I don’t think my job is threatened by AI. Generative AI can’t create new things. It can only make things based on the information we have already given it. So the AI isn’t able to prove or discover new theorems — at least not yet! And at the moment, Chat GPT and other AIs are very bad at solving maths problems! The maths I do is very complicated and it often gets things wrong.

      Maths is actually needed to help AI get better. A big part of maths is proving that things work. At the moment, there is no proof whether what the AI is saying is correct, so it is very hard to trust it. Maths is needed to prove this, and this is a huge area of research that people are working in!

      My job can sometimes be aided by AI, but it doesn’t really need to be. I find it useful to help me find mistakes in my code. I also use it to help me write emails because I am not great at this. But overall, I much prefer using my own brain to do my job. It’s very rewarding and much better for the planet!

Comments

  • Photo: Hannah

    Hannah commented on :

    That’s a really interesting question!
    We are just starting to use AI in my job, mainly in cell pathology when we are looking at biopsies and tissue samples to see if someone has cancer. AI is really good at looking at those images and picking out things that look like they might be cancerous or from a tumour, and we are also starting to do something similar for blood cancers.
    We do still need a human to look at it to confirm it at the end and make the formal diagnosis, but it is certainly making the screening process easier.