University workers generally do not believe that their jobs will be taken by artificial intelligence in the short term but experts have warned against complacency, saying that automation may still be used as “justification” to cut roles anyway.
While respondents to Times Higher Education’s UK University Redundancy Survey expressed widespread concern about the impact of the tens of thousands of job losses across the UK sector, concerns over the effect of AI remain low.
Asked: “Do you fear you will be made redundant within the next three years due to the rise of AI?” more than half (55 per cent) disagreed, with 17 per cent of these strongly disagreeing.
Just under 5 per cent strongly agreed and 14 per cent said they agree, while a fifth (21 per cent) neither agreed or disagreed.
Men were more likely to strongly disagree with the statement compared with women (22 per cent compared with 13 per cent), and a quarter of STEM workers strongly disagreed (25 per cent), compared with 17 per cent of humanities and arts workers and 16 per cent of those in the social sciences.
