The machines may be taking over, but not everyone will end up working for them. Indeed, according to recent MIT research, it accomplishes little to rage against the AI machine, Luddite hammer in hand. No, the best way to beat the machines is to complement them with uniquely human skills.
In other words, if you don’t want to work for machines, don’t be a tool.
Honey, The Machines Shrunk My Labor Pool
Ensconced in the bubble-fied atmosphere of Silicon Valley, it’s easy to forget that not everyone views technology as salvific. In fact, many fear their jobs will be automated away, just as they may have once (or still do) felt that their jobs would be off-shored.
Their fears are not misplaced, though technology hasn’t always had its desired effects.
Though technology is meant to boost productivity, John Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and a noted authority on worker productivity, has found that technological innovations over the past decade have failed to spark productivity gains. Why? Largely because those innovations were focused on the technology industry itself.
Applied to other areas like the service sector, as the Economist notes, would likely yield much greater gains.
It would also yield significant unemployment for those whose jobs are displaced. The light at the end of the tunnel, the Economist continues, is that “as technology displaces workers from a particular occupation it enriches others, who spend their gains on goods and services that create new employment for the workers whose jobs have been automated away.”
Sounds great, right? Well, not if it’s your job that has been handed to the machines.
Rule #1: Don’t Be A Tool
In their research, however, MIT professors Frank MacCrory, George Westerman and Erik Brynjolfsson, in partnership with Yousef Alhammadi from the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, parse data from studies in 2006 and 2014 to show the kind of job skills that have increased in value as technology has taken over.
In 2006, the seven skills that would get you ahead looked like this:
- Manual: Dynamic strength, gross body coordination, handling physical objects, manual dexterity, speed of limb movement, stamina
- Equipment: Equipment maintenance, installation, operation monitoring, repairing, systems analysis, troubleshooting
- Supervision: Coordinate others’ work, develop/build teams, guide/motivate subordinates, manage financial resources, monitor resources, schedule work or activities
- Perception: Category flexibility, far vision, perceptual speed, selective attention, speed of closure, visual color discrimination
- Interpersonal: Adaptability, assisting or caring for others, cooperation, dependability, service orientation, stress tolerance
- Initiative: Achievement, independence, initiative, tnnovation, persistence
- Vehicle Operation: Operate vehicles, night vision, peripheral vision, sound localization, spatial orientation
By 2014, the list of desirable skills had narrowed to five:
- Cognitive: Complex problem solving, critical thinking, deductive reasoning, oral comprehension, speed of closure, written expression
- Manual: Equipment maintenance, finger dexterity, handling physical objects, multi-limb coordination, reaction time, visual color discrimination
- Supervision: Coordinate others’ work, develop/build teams, guide/motivate subordinates, manage financial resources, monitor resources, schedule work or activities
- Interpersonal: Adaptability, assisting or caring for others, cooperation, dependability, service orientation, stress tolerance
- Initiative: Achievement, independence, initiative, innovation, persistence
By comparing the two, the authors conclude that the skills that continue to drive higher salaries and continued relevance in a technology-fueled marketplace are those that are distinctly human:
More complex interpersonal interactions, such as those in sales, customer service, and supervision, remain the domain of human workers. We can expect that occupations will shift toward those skills in which humans have a relative advantage over machines. Machines have demonstrated limited ability to perform interpersonal tasks, and human customers have a preference for interacting with other humans
Which Is Which?
It’s not always easy, however, to discern between “machine-ready” and “people-oriented.”
As one example, the research describes legal contract review as something we may feel only a lawyer can do. (No jokes, please, about the relative humanity of lawyers.) Lawyers, despite a healthy dose of self-respect, deliver a paltry 55-60% success rate at finding problems in a contract, while computers routinely see a much higher success rate of 80-90%.
Contract review is tedious and repetitive (every single review involves haggling over indemnification and limitation of liability, for example), but it seems like a human affair. Not so, apparently.
At any rate, rather than fear that machines will steal our jobs, it’s perhaps time to focus even more on developing our humanity. It’s the one thing computers can never replace.
Photo by spencer cooper
