By Tom Haynes

Artificial intelligence will play a role in most of our jobs in the coming years with investment bank Goldman Sachs predicting AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs.   

In the near future, customer service phone lines could be answered by a robot, while graphic designers, computer programmers, writers and teachers may well find their roles consumed, at least in part, by software.

Roughly half of British workers believe AI will impact their jobs in some way in the next five years, according to a study by PwC. Just last month, BT announced it would cut 55,000 jobs, and replace a fifth of its workers with AI. 

Amid fears entire industries could be replaced by algorithms, jobsite Adzuna ranked the best-paying jobs the least under threat from AI, drawing on research from OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Specialist medical professionals ranked among the highest-paid roles best insulated from the march of technology, according to advertised salaries on Adzuna.

Average salaries for oncologists were £208,942 a year in June, compared to £194,510 last year – an increase of 7.4pc.

Orthodontists, paediatricians, surgeons, and midwives also scored highly, with advertised salaries ranging from £55,000 to £100,000. 

However, the average pay for some roles has dipped year-on-year. 

Pay across listed vacancies for orthodontists had dropped by 11.5pc, from £120,337 to £106,485, Adzuna said. Meanwhile, pay for midwives skyrocketed by 20.5pc – from £46,213 to £55,696 – in response to an exodus of midwives during the pandemic.

Jobs requiring subjective reasoning, including judges and politicians, were similarly deemed safe from the AI revolution.

MPs are paid £86,584 a year, and while judge vacancies are not advertised on jobsites, they can expect to earn salaries far in excess of £100,000. Adzuna listed 731 vacancies for chief executive positions in June, however, average pay had dropped by 4.6pc year-on-year – from £85,143 to £81,205.

Elsewhere, the jobsite said society would be reluctant to accept jobs involving “human stories or motivation”, such as influencers, life coaches, or personal trainers, being performed by AI. However, pay for the latter fell from £48,575 to £40,560 across more than 11,000 listed vacancies – a drop of 16.5pc.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, manual labour was also deemed safe from automation. Blue-collar jobs including surfacing, and tamping equipment operators (average salary £85,800), overhead line workers (£51,886) and brick masons (£50,345) dominated the list. Oil rig workers, crane drivers, and carpenters also ranked highly.

Even as companies embracing AI futures replace swathes of their workforce, the presence of the software is expected to generate jobs specifically geared around monitoring its use. 

Prompt engineers, AI ethics officers, and AI auditors are expected to be common job roles in the near future, Adzuna said.

But the impact of AI has had a devastating effect on some workers in the tech industry. 

Listed salaries for ethical hackers (who test companies’ online security), for example, are half of what they were last year. Across a similar number of vacancies advertised pay fell from £89,888 to £41,417.