3 Skills You Need to Save Your Job From a Robot

by Tim Leberecht for Inc.You've heard the rumblings of the robots, right? When I make a customer service call and get an eerily nuanced answer from a chatbot, I hear the rumbling of the robots. When I call out to my digital assistant and Siri/Alexa/Cortana makes a wise-cracking response, I feel the rumblings. I can't help but love my Roomba, and I have mixed feelings about the robot that assembled my car, but what about the more nebulous forms of Artificial Intelligence?Up to 50 percent of the human workforce may be replaced by machines, a 2013 Oxford study predicts, and McKinsey estimates that 60 percent of all jobs have least 30 percent of activities "that are technically automatable, based on technologies available today." The threat is real: Between 1990 and 2007, for every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent in the US, according to a new study conducted by MIT and Boston University economists.If you're not worried about AI and the future of your job, then you're not human. So stop right there: Being more human is exactly what will save us from the robots.I call my strategy for beating the robots "The Revenge of the Liberal Arts." Here are 3 ways to be more human and help you maintain your job in the age of AI:1. Write poetryI define human as puzzling. Fuzzy. Moody. Exuberant. An elastic mind that can bend in all kinds of direction has a head start on robots. Go ahead. Rhyme. Or not. You don't have to show anyone.Read More →