Humans over robots?
50 % of the jobs cannot be automated because of emotion and context.
First, emotion. Emotion plays an important role in human communication. It is critically involved in virtually all forms of nonverbal communication and in empathy. But more than that, it is also plays a role in helping us to prioritize what we do, for example helping us decide what needs to be attended to right now as opposed to later in the evening. Emotion is not only complex and nuanced, it also interacts with many of our decision processes and is difficult to build into an automated system.
Second, context. Humans can easily take context into account when making decisions or having interactions with others.
Context is particularly interesting because it is open ended This is a problem for machine learning, which operates on data sets that by definition were created previously, in a different context.
Our ability to manage and utilize emotion and to take into account the effects of context are key ingredients of critical thinking, creative problem solving, effective communication, adaptive learning, and good judgment. It has proven very difficult to program machines to emulate such human knowledge and skills, and it is not clear when
All of this suggests that our educational systems should concentrate not simply on how people interact with technology (e.g., by teaching students to code), but also how they can do the things that technology will not be doing soon. This is a new approach to characterizing the underlying nature of “soft skills,” which are probably misnamed: These are the skills that are hardest to understand and systematize, and the skills that give — and will continue to give —humans an edge over robots.
HBR: S.M. Kosslyn