Some Skills Can’t Be Automated

A recent study from Forrester estimated that 10% of U.S. jobs would be automated this year, and some estimate that many more jobs will be automated in the next decade. But perhaps asking which jobs will be eliminated is less relevant than asking which aspects of remaining jobs are unlikely to be automated.
 
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Stephen M. Kosslyn, former Dean of Social Science at Harvard and author of Building the Intentional University, posits that while routine and repetitive tasks lend themselves to non-human replacement, aspects of jobs that require two critical elements will be difficult to automate.

1. Emotion: Emotion plays an important role in human communication (think of a physician explaining treatment options to a critically ill patient). It involves empathy as well as all forms of nonverbal communication. Beyond that, emotion, which is nuanced and complex, interacts with many of our decision processes. For example, it helps us to prioritize what we do right now as opposed to later. As of now, the functioning of genuine emotion is difficult to build into an automated system.
   
   
2. Context: Machine learning operates on data sets that by definition were created previously. But context changes all the time—often rapidly. For example, earlier this year we were suddenly operating in the context of a pandemic. Humans can take context into account when making decisions or having interactions with others.

 
As Kosslyn points out, employers highly value the kind of “soft” skills that are intrinsically linked to contextual evaluation and emotion: critical thinking, clear communication, and holistic decision-making. “All of this suggests that our educational systems should concentrate not simply on how people interact with technology,” he writes, “… but also how they can do the things that technology will not be doing soon.”
 
What do you think humans can do much better than machines in the workplace? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

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