Institute For The Future

What are the Least Essential Skills in the AI Future?

 

Tweet your least essential future skill with: #LEASTessential #futurefit!

 

Around the world, the workforce is gearing up for a future of robots and artificial intelligence.

Maybe they’re busy learning coding skills. Or signing up for AI programming classes. Or figuring out how to do repairs on unruly robots.

But according to two dozen AI experts who met at Institute for the Future this month to anticipate future skills for the AI era, coding, programming, and mechanical repairs may be the least important skills. Because intelligent machines are going to do those tasks.

Usually, when we think about future skills, we want to know the most essential skills. But thinking about least essential skills can be a more provocative way to see the shift from today’s landscape to the future horizon. What disappears from our list—and our classes and careers—when we take the time to think about what will be least essential?

Here’s are a few of the skills our experts don’t expect to see in our futures:

• Coding—systems will be self-programming

• Building AI systems—graphic interfaces will turn AI programming into drag-and-drop operations

• Calendaring, scheduling, and organizing—no more email triage, either!

• Planning and even decision-making fall off everyone’s to-do list—AI assistants can pick that up

• Creating curricula—learners design their own personalized learning adventure

• Writing and reviewing resumes—reputation is social

• Translation and localization—happens in real-time

• Legal research and writing—criminal justice gets automated

• Validation skills—go with your gut, the machines will check your work

• Just about any repetitive task—if it’s repeatable, intelligent machines can learn to do it
  
  

Of course, this is just the west coast list. Watch for our east coast workshop at Southern New Hampshire University later this summer. Then watch for our AI Future Skills report at the Close-It Summit, October 15-18 in Austin, TX

Tweet your least essential future skill with #LEASTessential #futurefit!