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Empathy is the future-proof skill in the age of artificial intelligence
Most people in the future will be creators for other people; that is why empathy skills will become the currency of success in the future.
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Tech for mental health: The Emobot, a device that monitors the emotional state of the elderly to detect depression, anxiety and other mental health concerns using artificial intelligence, is seen beside a computer display showing mental health data, at the French tech start-up's booth at CES 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada, the United States. (AFP/Robyn Beck)
I
magine what will happen to us in 2040. People work from anywhere. ChatGPT-like systems are ubiquitous. Every piece of equipment is planted with generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, so people like having personal assistants helping them from one morning to the next to do things.
People in the future do not go to the office because most office functions are replaced by AI. Workers are no longer needed in factories because smart machines operate the production lines all year long, and in a continuous and automated pursuit to achieve efficiencies. The factories still need managers and efficiency analysts, but they are now replaced by algorithms that make decisions for the smart robots in the factory lines.
Human resources and finance teams will vanish; the intelligent enterprise resource systems, with generative AI, will replace them and the systems do much better jobs than human officers.
Offices are now moved to virtual spaces, such as the metaverse; today’s office buildings will be transformed into residential areas.
Most technical skills are replaced by AI and robots, including skills to write reports or opinion articles like this. This is just like the time when people who excelled in mathematical operations were no longer hired and were replaced by calculators and computers. What is now needed are people with a higher level of skills, such as programming and system analysis.
However, in the future, some people will possess skills that are still in-demand in the market. They are those people who are very savvy in developing new products the market falls in love with. These are the people who devote their lives to understanding the needs of other people, creating products and testing those products in a simulated environment before they launch products on the market.
