The Skills of Human Interaction Will Become Most Valuable in the Future

AlphaGo’s victory over Go champion Lee Se-dol reportedly shocked artificial intelligence experts, who thought such an event was 10 to 15 years away. But if the timing was a surprise, the outcome was not. On the contrary, it was inevitable and entirely foreseeable.

Playing complex games, even the most complex game ever invented, is precisely what computers do supremely well. Just as they beat the world champions at checkers and then chess, they were destined to beat the champion at Go. It’s a game of clear rules, and while winning required new forms of computing that rely on a computer that can learn from experience, a machine will eventually best all humans at tasks of this kind.

Yet I don’t believe, as some do, that human defeats like this one presage an era of mass unemployment in which awesomely able computers leave most of us with nothing to do. Advancing technology will profoundly change the nature of high-value human skills and that is threatening, but we aren't doomed.

The skills of deep human interaction, the abilities to manage the exchanges that occur only between people, will only become more valuable. Three of these skills stand out: The first, the foundation of the rest, is empathy, which is more than just feeling someone else’s pain. It’s the ability to discern what another person is thinking or feeling, whatever it may be, and to respond in an appropriate way.

The second is creative problem solving in groups. Research on group effectiveness shows that the key isn't team cohesion or motivation or even the smartest member’s IQ; rather, it’s the social sensitivity of the members, their ability to read one another and keep anyone from dominating.

The third critical ability, somewhat surprisingly, is storytelling, which has not traditionally been valued by organizations. Charts, graphs and data analysis will continue to be important, but that’s exactly what technology does so well. To change people’s minds or inspire them to act, tell them a story.

These skills, though basic to our humanity, are fundamentally different from the skills that have been the basis of economic progress for most of human history: Logic, knowledge and analysis, which we learned from textbooks and in classrooms, are now skills being commoditized by advancing technology. By contrast, the skills of deep human interaction address the often irrational reality of how human beings behave, and we find them not in textbooks but inside ourselves. As computers master ever more complexity, that’s where we’ll find the source of our continued value.

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