ten SKILLS
FoR the FUtURe WoRKFoRCe
8
1
SenSe-MAKInG
DEFiNiTioN: ability to determine the deeper meaning
or significance of what is being expressed
As smart machines take over rote, routine manufacturing
and services jobs, there will be an increasing demand for the
kinds of skills machines are not good at. These are higher-
level thinking skills that cannot be codified. We call these
sense-making skills, skills that help us create unique insights
critical to decision making.
When IBM's supercomputer, Deep Blue, defeated chess
grandmaster Gary Kasparov, many took this of a sign of its
superior thinking skills. But Deep Blue had won with brute
number-crunching force (its ability to evaluate millions of poss-
ible moves per second), not by applying the kind of human
intelligence that helps us to live our lives. A computer may be
able to beat a human in a game of chess or Jeopardy by sheer
force of its computational abilities, but if you ask it whether
it wants to play pool, it won't be able to tell whether you are
talking about swimming, financial portfolios, or billiards.
As computing pioneer Jaron Lanier points out, despite
important advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research it is
still the case that, "if we ask what thinking is, so that we can
then ask how to foster it, we encounter an astonishing and
terrifying answer: we don't know."
1
As we renegotiate the
human/machine division of labor in the next decade, criti-
cal thinking or sense-making will emerge as a skill workers
increasingly need to capitalize on.
2
SoCIAL InteLLIGenCe
DEFiNiTioN: ability to connect to others in a deep and
direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and
desired interactions
While we are seeing early prototypes of "social" and
"emotional" robots in various research labs today, the range
of social skills and emotions that they can display is very
limited. Feeling is just as complicated as sense-making,
if not more so, and just as the machines we are building
are not sense-making machines, the emotional and social
robots we are building are not feeling machines.
Socially intelligent employees are able to quickly assess the
emotions of those around them and adapt their words, tone
and gestures accordingly. This has always been a key skill for
workers who need to collaborate and build relationships of
trust, but it is even more important as we are called on to coll-
aborate with larger groups of people in different settings. Our
emotionality and social IQ developed over millennia of living
in groups will continue be one of the vital assets that give hu-
man workers a comparative advantage over machines.
MiT Media Lab's
Personal Robots
Group is developing
a robot that can
generate some
human-like
expressions.
http://robotic.media.mit.edu
iBM's latest
supercomputer,
Watson, recently took
on human contestants
at game-show
Jeopardy.
http://www-943.ibm.com/
innovation/us/watson/