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”.…