I’d been wondering about this for a while, and the Future of Jobs Report recently settled it for me: the most important skill in the AI era won’t be knowing how to use AI. It’ll be the ability to not become replaceable.
Yes, I read all 290 painstakingly detailed pages of the report. But what actually put the question to rest was the chart on page 37.
The traits that will increasingly keep you from being shown the door are, consistently: critical thinking, creativity, the ability to learn fast, leadership, and systems-level vision.
Executive functions — calculation, data entry, and generally the application of existing concepts — put you squarely in line to be replaced by a machine.
But even coding, and for that matter the basic prompting techniques you’re frantically signing up for course after course to learn, are just interface skills. Intermediate steps that can, eventually, be automated away.
If all you’re doing is copying? Tell me in the comments and defend it — if you can.
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