Which skills will be most valued in the AI era?
50% of this post is a summary of Shreyas Doshi's video about how to stay ahead in the age of AI. Rest of the 50% are my comments.
Background
1) CEOs might say AI is not going to affect jobs much in order to not cause panic, but the truth is that AI is definitely going to begin to affect things to a large extent in the coming years.
2) Models may be average at a lot of the things it does now, but it's going to get far better soon
3) AI is already doing a lot of routine and repetitive lower order tasks such as taking meeting notes, drafting basic emails, basic data processing, summarizing long documents, providing basic trouble shooting steps, generating code (lol about calling this routine and repetitive), generating reports, etc.
4) Teams are going to shrink in size. Meaning what earlier may have taken a team of 50 people (engineers, product managers, designers, marketers, customer support, etc) will now be done by a team of 10.
5) Lines are going to be blurred between roles. An engineer will be able to do design work. Designers can handle frontend development. So on.
6) While learning to code is useful, it's not the most important skill.
Most important skills we should be developing
7) Insight Generation: a) Understand human behaviour beyond surface level data. b) Look for unarticulated customer needs, as in they might say they need X but in reality you've realized what they are asking for is Y. c) Discern subtle market shifts. d) Understanding nuances in regulation. e) understand the competitive landscape deeply. f) and so on..
8) Build your creative muscle: Insights are just inputs. Need to convert them into solutions. While AI can be creative in some ways (like writing a poem), human creativity in complex problem-solving will remain a key advantage.
9) In summary, you should be building your ability to mine for insights. Then building your ability to convert this mined insights into creative solutions to address important problems.
The group that is most at-risk of disruption
10) We are going to see a lot of white collar workers in the lower end of the value chain struggle to keep up. Lower end of the value chain would refer to white collar roles where the day-to-day responsibilities are more rote in nature: Customer support, call centre agents, data entry, HR admins, accounts receivables, Manual QA testers. The lower one is in the value chain, the more urgently they need to upskill to move upwards.
11) In a country like India there are several such people in the lower end of the value chain. India is known for its BPO / ITES sectors. While such BPO/ITES companies did lift several household into the middle class, the scale at which that lift has been occurring is likely going to see a huge fall.
12) A lot of the BPO/ITES folks are doing tasks that are in the lower end of the value chain.
13) If the jobs of millions of such Indian youth no longer exists, then the resulting increase in unemployment rates will end up having ripple effects in the form of social unrest and other concerns.
14) Increased frustration of unemployed youth will lead to increased crime, youth protests turning violent, increased socialist tendencies (see how much support Zohran got for his socialist policies in the US), increased stress within family households, increased mental health issues, increased strain on public resources.
Why we should be optimistic about the long term
15) There's a lot of reason to be optimistic over the long term though. History has shown us that societies are resilient over a long enough time frame and we will therefore adapt. So while there'll be short term pain, over time we'll see the system stabilizing in a new equilibrium.
16) Governments across the world will be forced to create an AI ministry which will enact policies that address all the above concerns in a holistic way. All other ministries will be a second class to the AI ministry.
17) Our Indian education system will likely improve and adapt to a post AI world. It's not happening right now, but soon will.
18) The Chinese government is a good example of a forward thinking government that is enacting policies and programs right now to future proof themselves for an AI era. They think decades ahead.
19) The nature of work will end up becoming a lot more meaningful: everyone of us, would be working fewer hours per day, and those fewer hours will be spent on harder problems where only our higher order thinking and creativity will be utilized. So work will be a lot more meaningful and stimulating.