The Surprising Way AI Will Make Us Value "Soft Skills"

Today on the AI Breakdown, an optimistic take about why our technical skills being eclipsed will lead to our humanity being even more valued. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to breakdown.network for more information about our Discord, our newsletter, and our YouTube channel. Hello friends. Today we are reading and discussing a rarely positive essay about AI and work. The piece is called when your technical skills are eclipsed, your humanity will matter more than ever. It's by Aneesh Rahman, a workforce expert at LinkedIn, and Maria Flynn, the president of Jobs for the Future. I'm going to read it first and then we will discuss it. Anisha Maria write There have been just a handful of moments over the centuries when we have experienced a huge shift in the skills our economy values most. We are entering one such moment now. Technical and data skills that have been highly sought after for decades appear to be among the most exposed to advances in artificial intelligence. But other skills, particularly the people skills that we have long undervalued as soft, will very likely remain the most durable. That is a hopeful sign that AI could usher in a world of work that is anchored more, not less, around human ability. A moment like this compels us to think differently about how we are training our workers, especially the heavy premium we have placed on skills like coding and data analysis that continue to reshape the fields of higher education and worker training. The early signals of what AI can do should compel us to think differently about ourselves as a species. Our abilities to effectively communicate, develop empathy, and think critically have allowed humans to collaborate, innovate, and adapt for millenniums. Those skills are ones we all possess and can improve, yet they have never been properly valued in our economy or prioritized in our education and training. That needs to change. In today's knowledge economy, many students are focused on gaining technical skills because those skills are seen as the most competitive when it comes to getting a good job, and for good reason. For decades, we have viewed these jobs as future proof. Given the growth of technology companies and the fact that engineering majors land the highest paying jobs, the number of students seeking four year degrees in computer science and information technology shot up 41% between the spring of 2018 and the spring of 2023. While the number of humanities majors plummeted, workers who didn't go to college and those who needed additional skills and wanted to take advantage of a lucrative job boom flocked to dozens of coding boot camps and online technical programs. Now comes the realization of the power of generative AI, with its vast capabilities in skills like writing, programming, and translation. LinkedIn researchers recently looked at which skills any given job requires and then identified over 500 likely to be affected by generative AI technologies. They then estimated that 96% of a software engineer's current skills, mainly proficiency in programming languages, can eventually be replaced by AI. Skills associated with jobs like legal associates and finance officers will also be highly exposed. In fact, given the broad impact AI is set to have, it is quite likely to affect all of our work to some degree or another. We believe there will be engineers in the future, but they will most likely spend less time coding and more time on tasks like collaboration and communication. We also believe that there will be new categories of jobs that emerge as a result of AI's capabilities, just like we've seen in past moments of technological advancement, and that those jobs will probably be anchored increasingly around people skills. Circling around this research is the big question emerging across so many conversations about AI and work, namely, what are our core capabilities as humans? If we answer that question from a place of fear about what's left for people in the age of AI, we can end up conceding a diminished view of human capability. Instead, it's critical for us to start from a place that imagines what's possible for humans in the age of AI. When you do that, you find yourself focusing quickly on people skills that allow us to collaborate and innovate in ways technology can amplify but never replace. And you find yourself, whatever the role or career stage you're in with agency, to better manage this moment of historic change. Communication is already the most in demand skill across jobs on LinkedIn. Today, even experts in AI are observing that the skills we need to work well with AI systems, such as prompting, are similar to the skills we need to communicate and reason effectively with other people. Over 70% of executives surveyed by LinkedIn last year said soft skills were more important to their organizations than highly technical AI skills. And a recent Jobs for the Future survey found that 78% of the 10 top employing occupations classified uniquely human skills and tasks as important or very important. These are skills like building interpersonal relationships, natural negotiating between parties, and guiding and motivating teams. Now is the time for leaders across sectors to develop new ways for students to learn that are more directly and more dynamically tied to where our economy is going, not where it has been critically. That involves bringing the same level of rigor to training around people skills that we have brought to technical skills. Colleges and universities have a critical role to play. Over the past few decades, we have seen a prioritization of science and engineering, often at the expense of the humanities. That calibration will need to be reconsidered. Those not pursuing a four year degree should look for those training providers that have long emphasized people skills and are invested in social capital development. Employers will need to be educators not just around AI tools, but also on people skills and people to people collaboration. Major employers like Walmart and American Airlines are already exploring ways to put AI in the hands of employees so they can spend less time on routine tasks and more time on personal engagement with customers. Ultimately, for our society, this comes down to whether we believe in the potential of humans with as much conviction as we believe in the potential of AI. If we do, it is entirely possible to build a world of work that not only is more human, but also is a place where all people are valued for the unique skills they have, enabling us to deliver new levels of human achievement across so many areas that affect all of our lives, from healthcare to transportation to education. Along the way, we could meaningfully increase equity in our economy, in part by assisting the persistent gender gap that exists when we undervalue skills that women bring to work at a higher percentage than men. Almost anticipating this moment a few years ago, Manouch Shafiq, who is now the president of Columbia University, said, in the past jobs were about muscles, now they're about brains, but in the future they'll all be about the heart. The knowledge economy that we have lived in for decades emerged out of a goods economy that we lived in for millenniums, fueled by agriculture and manufacturing. Today, the knowledge economy is giving way to a relationship economy in which people skills and social abilities are going to become even more core to success than ever before. That possibility is not just cause for new thinking when it comes to workforce training, it is also cause for greater imagination when it comes to what is possible for us as humans, not simply as individuals and organizations, but as a species. All right, so back to NLW here. Firstly, overall thesis that AI taking over hugely technical parts of our jobs increases the premium on human social interactions and how we work with each other. Completely agree on the question of whether these skills have always been incredibly important and should have had more emphasis. Also completely agree, but I think there are some interesting jumping off points from this conversation that they don't quite get into here that are worth discussing as well as one of those has to do with what the future of developers really are. And if you listen to this show at all, you know that this is a big question. We were talking about it just the other day in the context of a number of different AI projects that are trying to build software, that builds software. What is the role of developers in that world? I think it's inevitable that what a developer does changes. My instinct though is that it's not quite as clear cut as their skills will be less useful or less in demand, as is kind of applied in this piece. Instead, I think that their function is going to be much more of an orchestrator. I think that almost everyone is going to become a project manager of one. In some ways a little tiny CEO of their own enterprise within whatever broader enterprise they're working on. Think about it. When you have multiple agents, different tools that are interfacing with one another, your job becomes figuring out how to make them all work together in harmony to achieve an end goal. Even if in some cases that means giving AI agents the ability to figure out how to work together to achieve an end goal. I tend to be in the camp that thinks that when push comes to shove, there's nearly unlimited demand for the types of things that developers can create and that the proliferation of more engineering capacity in the form of AI is just going to consequently increase the stuff that's being made, how customized it is, how niche it can be. But in short, that demand will catch up. So I don't think developers are going anywhere, even if I think their jobs look very different in the future. One of the parts of this though that is unspoken and needs to be addressed for the sake of society is that part of the shift that we've seen away from the humanities and towards engineering and other higher paying jobs over the last decade is just a rational response to the incredible increase in price of a four year college or university. There were effectively no bounds on how much more expensive college could get each year because in the zero interest rate era, there was a never ending supply of additional student loans and debt that could cover the costs. This was the racket that allowed college to get so expensive. At some point students started to realize that a lot of the majors that were made available to them was while they might be very good for their actual long term success, were totally disequilibrious with the amount of money that people were paying to get them. I think that the pressure now on education specifically to change the financial structures around it is going to be immense. In other words, let's say that we do start to really value and prioritize what have previously been called soft skills or about human interaction. Do we really think that a four year university that costs $200,000 is going to be the right way to learn those skills? Doubt it. Is instead real practical experience working in real situations perhaps with mentors and classes that go alongside going to look like a much better option for that? I don't know but it certainly seems possible. Point being that we're not just going to suddenly get the existing university infrastructure we have now to shift back to the humanities and soft skills and keep the price the same way it is. It's still just ludicrous so I think that's going to be a really interesting change to see. But again ultimately I agree with the underlying part of this which is that AI will in many many ways surprisingly bring out our humanity and place a greater premium on our humanity and that is a good thing. Anyways guys that is going to do it for today's long read episode of the AI Breakdown. Hope you are having a great weekend and until next time peace. Sam.