A recent article - “When Your Technical Skills Are Eclipsed, Your Humanity Will Matter More Than Ever” in the New York Times - amplified this message. 

The basic message is this: Thank God, you didn’t quit your job at 50 to follow the career advice to become a software engineer as they’re a dime a dozen now! 96% of a software engineer’s current skills can eventually be replicated by A.I. Instead, the best thing you can do is to dive deeper into what makes you a human: your unique way of communicating, collaborating, and showing compassion. Maybe humanities will make a comeback on college campuses?! Almost anticipating this moment a few years ago, Minouche Shafik, 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 be about the heart.”

I appreciated this final paragraph in the NYT piece which might suggest that we’re moving from the “survival of the fittest” to the “survival of the wisest”: 

“The knowledge economy that we have lived in for decades emerged out of a goods economy that we lived in for millennia, 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 work force 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.”

-Chip