Plumbers, electricians and gardeners have among the safest jobs amid the rise of AI chatbots, according to the Astronomer Royal Lord Rees.

Many white-collar professionals previously assured that their special talents were irreplaceable are in more trouble, he says, with lawyers and computer coders among those at risk of having their jobs taken by AI tool ChatGPT.

Accountants may end up job-sharing with the bot, which can look at balance sheets, and doctors could be working with more wide-ranging AI which can analyse medical scans.

But skilled blue-collar workers may have the last laugh in a future jobs market dominated by AI. Reassuringly, Lord Rees, an esteemed academic and former president of the Royal Society, believes the threat to our way of life from ChatGPT has been exaggerated.

Rather than humanity facing the rise of machines more intelligent than us, he says AI devices may be more like 'idiot savants', which understand words in great detail but are still limited in their real-world applications.

On the threat to the workplace from AI, Lord Rees told the Edinburgh Science Festival: 'Skilled service sector blue-collar jobs, like plumbing and gardening, they require non-routine interactions with the external world – they would be far harder to automate.'

Speaking to the Mail, he said: “Plumbers and gardeners have to go to a strange house and fiddle with appliances – and that requires an understanding of the real world.' Tech bosses including Twitter owner Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak recently signed an open letter demanding a pause to all AI research for at least six months to ensure the technology does not threaten humanity.

But Lord Rees said of a robot future: “The jury is out on whether they will be idiot savants or display superhuman capabilities and whether we should worry more about breakdowns or bugs.”

The cross-bench peer, whose latest book If Science is to Save Us looks at the technological future, does believe however that the future belongs to machines, which will outlive people. He says the first humans who merge their minds with computers to become part-Cyborg will be living on Mars.

Before that, he said: “We should embrace computers taking over work in call centres and robots replacing humans who pack parcels in Amazon warehouses.”