Must-Read: Jeff Engel: Robots Might Eat Your Job, But Being Human Could Get You A New One

Must-Read: But, unfortunately, teaching “creativity, empathy, teamwork, planning, problem solving, leadership, and so on” is very hard. And evaluating whether it is being successfully taught–whether the teaching of social engineering is any good–is even harder, in all likelihood because it may be easier to motivate the evaluators to give the teachers good scores than to motivate the students to learn…

Jeff Engel: Robots Might Eat Your Job, But Being Human Could Get You A New One: “Erik Brynjolfsson… ‘Will Robots Eat Your Job?’…

…The short answer is yes…. Automation has been transforming factories for years. But now, with advances in artificial intelligence technologies, automation is starting to also creep into fields that require less repetitive manual labor and perhaps seemed immune to this shift, such as law, healthcare, and journalism. “Machines are getting a lot better at many of these things,” Brynjolfsson said. “This a challenge we’re going to have to face, but I don’t think it’s a problem we have to face today…. There’s no shortage of work that can be done [only by humans] in the next 10 to 15 years.”… Educational institutions should focus instruction on areas where humans still have the advantage over machines. The examples he gave are mostly intangible characteristics and interpersonal skills: creativity, empathy, teamwork, planning, problem solving, leadership, and so on. “If we do that, I think we’ll have more people prepared to work alongside machines,” Brynjolfsson said. “Machines can help with a lot of that as well. There are educational technologies that can help identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of students and personalize things.”…

“We will get to a world where machines can do almost everything.” If handled in the right way, that “should be one of the best things that has happened to humanity”…. But it will require massive changes in how society operates… universal basic income or related programs so that people can sustain themselves. For now, Brynjolfsson wants to see leaders put more energy into solving more immediate issues, such as ensuring a skilled workforce and addressing stagnating wages…. “The most important thing we can do to address that is reinvent education and invest more in education.”