Major Trends for AI and Work in 2026: Critical Thinking, AI Automation, Robotics, and AI Audits скачать в хорошем качестве

Major Trends for AI and Work in 2026: Critical Thinking, AI Automation, Robotics, and AI Audits

Welcome to Episode 2 of Series 3 on AI & Work, our deep-dive into the part of the AI conversation everyone keeps circling but rarely slowing down to actually think about: skills. As one big tech exec put it (paraphrasing but not really): AI has never been more powerful — and we’ve never been more confused. Cool cool cool. In this episode, we zoom out to look at the major trends shaping AI and work in 2026 — from automation and robotics to AI audits and the not-so-sexy but extremely necessary return of critical thinking (yes, that thing we were all told we could outsource). Spoiler alert: the theme is SKILLS SKILLS SKILLS — especially domain expertise and the ability to not blindly trust whatever the model spits out. We break the conversation down through three (and sometimes four 👀) voices: the companies building these tools, the researchers studying them, the industries using and selling them — and, occasionally, the product itself. We talk institutional pressure, productivity fantasies, and why “just adopt AI” is way easier said than done when time, profit, and quality are all screaming at you. And because we practice what we preach, Angy puts on her industry-practitioner hat and actually audits AI using AI for this very podcast. Can NotebookLM really read, synthesize, and communicate research accurately enough? Can ChatGPT hold a coherent conversation about epistemology? The answers are… instructive. We also dig into youth attitudes toward AI and work, what people want AI to automate versus what experts think it can automate, and why uncritical adoption might be the most expensive skill gap of all. TL;DR: AI isn’t replacing your job — but it is replacing your excuses for not thinking carefully about how you use it. And, fun fact, chatGPT wrote this blurb! We normally craft the blurbs completely from our own brains, but this time, of course, keeping with the audit trend, we asked chatGPT: “can you create a blurb for our video for series 3 on AI and work and AI's impact on our relationship to work, episode 2 deep dive? Below are some skeleton notes for the episode (see: series 3 ep 2 notes) and example blurbs I've written for all the rest of our episodes (see: past episode blurbs). For this blurb, please conform to how I write the past blurbs - funny, colloquial, and informative/grabbing!” - This is Our Lives With Bots, the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep. Rose and Angy are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you. You can learn more about us at ⁠ourliveswithbots.com⁠. https://ourliveswithbots.com/ https://ourliveswithbots.com/about/ Links: Audio file for NotebookLM podcast on Shao et. al’s “Future of Work” article (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kors...) PDF file for NotebookLM presentation on article (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ssZG...)