By Karina Kaae – Futurist, company advisor, speaker, Sustainable Lead As a futurist and company advisor in the future sustainable life, I have summarised what I believe are some of the most critical skills to train already today, if we want to stay fit in the future job market. Because, when artificial intelligence moves into our jobs, when the freelance economy booms and when stress, anxiety and depression are the leading disease burdens, how do we not only survive but thrive as workers? 1. CONTINUOUS LEARNING – The 4th industrial revolution with artificial intelligence (AI) means that 50% of workers need reskilling within the next 5 years according to Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl from Digital Europe. The times where we specialised in one field and stayed in this is over. In the future we will have multiple careers. One way to look at it, is to invest in your own upskilling and learning and make it a habit to dedicate at least 10% of your working week for this. “Life-long learning” is a term we will get used to. 2. POSITIVE FUTURE-IMAGINATION – Robots and AI are bringing out a lot of fear in people. As the Chief Decision Scientist at Google, Cassie Kozyrkov, expressed it: If we are afraid of AI we are afraid of humans. But a lot of our fear is based on made-up, weird science fiction and not hopes and dreams of a better future. But as humans we are basically going to be the trainers of AI, and it is therefore in our power to remember to continuously ask better questions, and dream about better futures and we will be able to create this with AI as our new power tool. 3. EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE – AI and machine learning will increasingly take over more of our logical tasks. Look at AI as your future personal assistant. If you are a doctor AI will e.g. help you examine x-rays with much greater precision and speed than a human person can ever do. This leaves you extra time and attention to the critical aspect of patient care, human touch and empathy. Therefore, EQ will be a sought-after power skill for the future across industries. That said AI is certainly able to mimic emotional intelligence, which you can see already today in some service jobs. For example, in some Pizza Hut Restaurants you can meet a very friendly service robot as your waiter. 4. CRITICAL THINKING – AI is in a nutshell a reproduction of human behaviour by a machine, which is taught by examples. These examples are past data. Therefore, AI is only as good as the examples (data) that the algorithms are based on. Many of our future jobs will therefore involve our critical thinking and our abilities to use human judgement. It will be a critical skill to remember to bring in different human perspectives from our colleagues and collaborators to challenge our own preconceptions to avoid biased AI. 5. CREATIVITY AND ART THINKING – With […]
