by Ronni Littlewood (AI.RDN+ Project Manager)
9th June 2026
My social media at the moment feed seems to be constantly flooded with posts about how and when AI will significantly disrupt our jobs, or even mean that some career-choices will become obsolete? For many of us now in middle-age, doom-laden predictions about new technology are familiar. From the advent of word-processors to desktop computers, the world-wide web, smartphones and social media, each shift has changed how we work. Some skills have disappeared, but new roles and industries have emerged.
Is AI just another technological shift with a range of negative and positive consequences for society. How is AI already changing the world of work, and are the projections for the future? It’s a topic that has also been a key theme of this year’s Cheltenham Science Festival. The Festival even had its own AI curator, influencer and official ambassador AIDA. I attended an event on the Future of Work, featuring a conversation with Financial Times Journalist Sarah O’Connor and Professor Richard Susskind, a leading expert on the impact of AI on society. I hoped to better understand which jobs and skills may disappear, what opportunities may emerge, but it presented something much more profound.
In ‘We are not Machines[1]’, Sarah O’Connor describes how translators have been one of the most detrimentally affected professions. AI translation tools are replacing the work of someone who has amassed a wealth of experience of language to be able to reflect the cultural nuances in a text, but at present AI can’t translate as well as a professional translator. Translators are being asked to make machine translated text more authentic (a process called machine translation post-editing); a task which O’Connor’s interviewees describe as requiring much more cognitive effort than translating from scratch due to working with and comparing two texts concurrently. The expectation from employers however is that this task is in effect just polishing, it takes away the interesting elements of translation and replaces it with something perfunctory. Translators are offered greatly reduced pay and expected to turn work around more rapidly. Compensating for the limitations of machine translation by adding human-like authenticity is paradoxically more dehumanising work for the translator.
Shouldn’t AI do the tedious, mundane tasks and free up our time to focus on more the more interesting work? Yet this is only today’s AI; future agentic systems may require far less human involvement. As Richard Susskind writes in ‘How to Think About AI; A Guide for the Perplexed’[2] ‘there is much that we can currently imagine and conceive but there will be much more that is simply beyond our current contemplation.’ If today’s AI tools are becoming more like assistants, will they soon become, co-workers or even bosses? Will what we know as ‘work’ will be largely done by machines, and what does that mean for us? And for today’s aspiring academic researchers, how much of the process will be driven by AI rather than aided or augmented by it?
The event was fascinating and thought-provoking. If it offered one conclusion, it was the importance of purpose in the work we choose, if we’re lucky enough to have that choice. If work fulfils a need in us for problem-solving, connection, creativity or however we give it meaning, perhaps now is the time to
[1] O’Connor, S. (2026) We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work. London: Penguin Books Ltd
[2] Susskind, R. (2025) How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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