> nearly half of U.S. jobs would be vulnerable to automation within 20 years. But “computers aren’t good at simulating human interaction,” Deming said. That means a job as a manager or consultant is harder to automate, and the skills those jobs require become more valuable.
If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
> Women are getting jobs that require more social skills.
If the share of jobs that require interpersonal skill has in fact increased over the years just as the author postulates, is it really a wonder that share of women who hold these types of jobs have also increased ? Why exactly did the author show only the graph representing how the nature of jobs has changed for women ? Is the author trying to prove women are naturally better at these things ?
> Although cognitive skills don’t vary by gender, Deming cites research from psychology showing that women consistently score higher on tests of emotional intelligence and social perceptiveness.
This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
>This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things.
Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case? People are different, sets of people differ along various, sometimes similar parameters.
>This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
It really shouldn't though. Differing from one subset of people should not impact your rights as a human being. 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights.
Who is naturally better at lifting heavy objects -- men or women?
Who is naturally better at bearing children -- men or women?
Reality isn't gender-equal, or even finely balanced like a Starcraft game. Equality means equal rights, not equal abilities. (A strict belief in the latter gets us into Harrison Bergeron territory.)
If we're talking cognitive skills, there is rough equality in ability, but a difference in approach which makes one sex better for a particular job than the other. If women tend more to seek social consensus, for instance, they would fare better in a software engineering job with a high degree of peer collaboration, as opposed to the same job in a more "cowboy coding" environment.
I agree its a puff piece. They are basically saying 1+1 > 1+0 - of course its better to have tech skills AND social skills on top instead of just tech, but thats trivial.
10 years ago at university a professor in economics told us that skills like design and social competence would become more important, as the actual tech would be outsourced to India or east europe, and focusing on tech would be unwise.
When I look at the programmer consulting rates, the opposite has happened. Glad I made the right choice.
"This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality."
Good job comrade, drawing attention to someone (perhaps an innocent mistake - but we can't let these pass either) about to embark on danger-noticing and danger-think.
Hopefully you will stay vigilant and the offender will not relapse.
Do you honestly believe that women aren't naturally worse at certain things? How about physical strength? Any man ranked in the top 50 of the tennis pro tour can smoke pretty much any woman who plays tennis. You'll find the same is the case with squash, cricket, basketball, you name it. It is a natural inequality, and there is no point in denying it. "Equality" does not mean equality of results. It means equality of opportunity.
> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
Lower demand of workers and over-supply of candidates = employers' market = greater expectations placed on workers for lower pay. This would change nice-to-have attributes of excellent candidates from nice-to-have to compulsory as workers have to be even more perfect just to keep their job against the 100 other people lined up ready to take it from them. Besides, if there are 3 equally-qualified people with people skills and 5 without, it's a no brainer because the non-people-skilled folks are liabilities: they can kill the team dynamic, put people off and waste time & money (finding new coworkers to replace those that left whom will put up with their antics, finding new customers/vendors/partners/etc. that they put off, etc.). I know of a number of first-hand cases where some arrogant developers were passed over for hiring consideration at a successful enterprise startup because it was clear they would be too difficult to work with.
In labor markets with a foreseeable overabundance of talent, the future of work may include a number of people willing to work even longer for free, far longer than internships, simply to showcase their chops, get real experience and edge out other candidates/employees. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, but it certainly seems headed down that path.
One thing it seems most of the comments replying to are missing is that women are trained, in the US, to be "nice", emotionally observant, and socially fluent. Even throwing innate differences to the wind, watch family interactions and see four-year-old Lucy get reprimanded for not hugging Grandma and four-year-old Lionel not hugging Grandma and everyone laughing and saying, "How cute, little man!" and giving him an out (a wave, a handshake). Through the power of social ostracism women have learned to act nice and be emotionally observant even when they don't feel it.
Guys have their own pressures, of course, starting with the basic "don't cry" and "man up" and going from there. Imagine Lucy and Lionel scraping up their knees mildly on a rock: Lucy will get a lot of cuddles and hugs when she cries, and Lionel will be treated rather differently -- a range of responses from a briefer hug to "You're fine!" This definitely influences peoples' ideas of appropriate interpersonal interactions.
Agreed. But what I put to even more suspicions are your arguments...
> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
No, when non-human tasks get delegated to non-humans, human skills will be where humans will be most needed, and this goes in line with data presented, and is fairly self-evident.
> Is the author trying to prove women are naturally better at these things?
Author gives research in support to that and you quote quotation of it yourself.
> If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things.
There's no need to stretch anything, that's a fact. It is dangerous thinking, I agree. But so is atomic energy, AI, gene splicing... Besides being dangerous, it's also inevitable.
> This could be impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
I resent generalization our without further specification on who exactly.
Well how do you define "naturally better"? If you live in a world that is dominated by people who are not like you, with more political power, more money, and more physical strength, wouldn't it be logical that you would learn more how to handle people than them because you require their cooperation more than they require yours? I don't think "naturally better" must mean genetically better. In this case it would mean formed by society in that regard and therefore better.
"Naturally better" could also mean a result of survival bias. There are hundreds of reasons why there are more male physicists than female ones in the line of history. But we see more of them. So one simple (but as we know now incorrect) conclusion might be that men are better at physics. In the same regard we could observe more socially skilled females in the work place because these are the ones that make it there.
>This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
Ideally gender equality will be reached when we are judged by our own skills, without regard to our gender. Yes, a man may do better at X and a woman may do better by Y, but I'm hiring you because you are good at Z and I need someone good at Z and I don't care which gender is better in general, because you are the one I'm interviewing and you are good at Z.
He doesn't say or even suggest that they are naturally better. Anyone who has an interest in the topic knows that boys and girls are treated differently by parents and society. Perhaps if boys were given a chance to express any emotion other than anger and encouraged to resolve disputes without fighting they would also be better at these skills.
> If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
It's more complex than that. Having natural ability does not mean those without that ability cannot excel in that area with hard work. Also, by the same token, some people with a lot of natural ability for certain things never take advantage of their talent because they never put the effort into realizing their potential.
So, in summary, acknowledging that natural ability is real does not give an automatic debating point to the other side of the argument because it's often the case that what you do with that innate talent will be more important.
>If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
This doesn't cause a decline in jobs, any more than the decline of mainstream farming (90%+ of the population used to be farmers, but in the last few centuries it's less than 3%) caused the majority of the population to be unemployed.
What it causes is more jobs in other areas. Or alternatively, it makes everything more profitable and therefore allows the relevant companies to bloat themselves up needlessly with more layers of management, because they can afford it.
> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
Here's my answer to this paradox. The humans vs machines is just another "good old boys club". Of course humans don't want to relinquish control and be managed by machines, they are not silly. So they create another layer of "soft skills" which prevents from machines (or people who understand them) taking over.
Take a high-frequency trading company as an analog. The job is done by computers and technicians running them. Still, the CEO and investors into this are probably better paid than those technicians, and make all the important decisions. (In fact, today you could probably create a completely self-managed HFT company that would just put all the profit into hiring more technicians who manage its algorithms.)
And I think this was always the case in human history (although not against machines, just against other social groups); and many technical people here seem to be in denial of this reality. What we can do though is to attempt to change this, but it will require political, not technological, solutions (that is people skills).
Computers have learned to manage computers and people, and they learned to program themselves. Almost all job offerings are for professional huggers, preferably human.
>> This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
No, it should inform our quest to bring about gender equality. We should be hiring people based on who they are as an individual, and not because of their gender or some quota, right? So if it's a fact that gender brings with it a tendency to be better / worse at different things, we shouldn't ignore it. Knowing the difference can help us measure when a statistical difference is explainable with gender-related tendencies, and when it's clearly because of discrimination. Trying to force a 50/50 split in cases where gender-related tendencies are significant seems silly to me.
edit: I do, however, agree that just dismissing something as "women are different" is bad, because people often fail to take into account what is an inherent chromosomal difference and what is because of stereotypes that people grew up with. So let's distinguish between biases and facts, but facts should not be considered "dangerous". It's what we do with the facts that matters.
> This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
I think human skills remain important in order to figure out what the customer wants. Computers might do a lot of the work, but these computers still need to be programmed. You need to understand the customer's needs and translate these into a user friendly experience.
The essence of this change seems to be that it's 'easy' to program a computer. It's harder to know what to program so that people will want to use it.
>> The Best Jobs NOW Require You to Be a People Person
"Even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15% of one's financial success is due one's technical knowledge and about 85% is due to skill in human engineering, to personality and the ability to lead people" - Dale Carnegie 1936
Of the people in the world who are the most wealthy, I don't think many of them come across publicly as 'people person' types. There are myriad stories surrounding Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, etc and how they're dreadful to work with. Jobs especially - people can't write entire listicles about how awful you are if you're a people person, but Business Insider managed it - http://uk.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?op=1
Maybe if you want a high paying job working for someone else then you should brush up on your 'soft skills'; but if money is really the driving force behind that decision then you'd be better off developing a fiercely ruthless attitude and starting a business of your own.
The article is talking about ongoing changes in what skills are most valuable. Bill Gates got super-rich by running Microsoft from 1975 to 2000. There's no inconsistency between "hard tech skills were most valuable 15-40 years ago" and "people skills are going to be most valuable over the next 20 years".
And I think you may be mixing up two things that could be meant by phrases like "people person". It could be that being nice isn't very effective in bringing dramatic success, but that *understanding people and being able to manipulate them" is.
(And ... very, very few people are Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Even if your goal is to get rich, you probably do better by asking "how can I get into the top 0.1% of the population by wealth" than by asking "how can I get into the top 10 of the population by wealth", and the answers to those might be quite different.)
Those people are not just ruthless. People also believe in them and their vision. When that's the case, people understand that when they are pushed hard to complete something it's so that they will be successful. Any run of the mill manager or entrepreneur can't just push their people hard and expect to be the next <Insert favorite CEO>.
I went on a tour with my son's robotics club to a company that makes robotic arms and such for factories.
At the end the CEO said if their is one thing he can recommend to all kids (I was ready for him to say take STEM classes), is for them to take public speaking. He said it's so critical for them to be able to properly share your ideas and listen to people. Quite interesting.
Replace "people person" with "strong communicator" and I can buy into such a premise very easily.
For many years I've expressed a belief that the only skill set that will remain viable throughout technological change is the ability to communicate. In simplified form, there are many friction points in social or commercial interactions which can be worsened by mis-communication or conflicting social norms. For example, certain cultures have very low opinions of women, and when expressed as though it's a norm in a different environment, that doesn't promote a successful outcome.
For a shorthand example, just check out advertising. Yes, there's a significant amount of data-driven research, and I know Google is at the top of this pile of...commerce...with its AdWords, so I take that to infer advertising is one of the most hit-or-miss areas where disruption was beneficial.
But here's the thing: Algorithms can't write jingles or colloquial slogans that will resonate with a particular audience. They can analyze them, but not create them, and I'm comfortable holding this belief until I see something which really revolutionizes technology in this field. I try to keep up with progress in conversational AI and the Turing Test challenge when I can, because I see that as the first major field where progress can be quantified and proven a success.
Oh, and this is legitimately tongue-in-cheek, but if you want to see a great example of what I mean, just look at the role of a Chief Executive Officer. They don't actually work as we might define it by input of labor, crunching numbers, or assembling information - they take loads of input, run it through their internal processor, then tell people what to do. They network, socialize, and communicate and for some reason, in the US, get paid vast sums of money for performing this role. I find it kind of funny and sad how high they're held in esteem, when realistically, they put in fewer hours, less effort, and reap rewards far greater than the run-of-the-mill high school teacher.
The hardest things for machines to get right is to act human - i.e. social skills. As tasks that are easy to automate will continue to be rewarded less, and tasks that are hard to automate will increase in cost (e.g. education, health care), it pays, literally, to develop good social skills and become a people person, no matter what field you're in.
It is by achieving the essence of what it means to be human, a person is valued within human society.
Automation is a given, more-and-more things are going to be automated. People jobs are going to be the last to be automated too, perhaps these jobs never will be automated, although a lot of low-level traditionally people-facing jobs will, e.g. shop assistants, it's already started.
But notwithstanding the above, there are logical holes in the rest of the article. I won't even mention that slight on high-tech work by equating it to "plugging away at a spreadsheet".
The biggest flaw was the assumption that the automation to make the aforementioned spreadsheet obsolete would be done without those people. In reality, any person highly-paid to "plug away" at a spreadsheet would be paid due to their domain/industry knowledge and skills rather than purely Excel skills and would still be employed operating a new system, or even directly involved in building and maintaining such systems.
This pattern is repeated throughout the article. Technology will obsolete low-tech grunt work first, mainly because contrary to the central premise of that article, technology is a people business. It's not a people business in the same was sales or marketing is, it's not about who's got the biggest set of contacts[0], but you'll never build a successful product without understanding the world it fits in to; building good technology requires a good deal of listening and empathy, both toward the customer, but also to the system as a whole and your fellow engineers.
In the short-to-medium term, any acceleration in automation will also increase demand for engineers in that field. And any such systems will only be as good as those who made them, even knowledge-workers not in the automation business will still be required to operate/design/improve such systems. Maybe in smaller numbers...
What happens after that, no one knows. The effects on the economy would be difficult to predict. And one day in ten, fifty, a hundred, several thousand years from now, fully autonomous AI will be here... and all bets are off. Long-term predictions would be foolish.
[0] - except for the sale and marketing of a technology business, of course, it's not a binary situation.
most importantly, who's gonna build the automation?
there are engineering needs for a hundred years or more* to transform current work centered society in an automation centered society, and even then those things won't just maintain themselves forever.
*not because technical challenges, but because the resistance from who detains the status quo
Didn't we just have a story on HN claiming that introverts make the best something-or-other? I'm not even trying to keep up with things like this anymore.
On the contrary, the software production value chain is fragmenting. On one end you have the hardcore mathematicians building things in Idris in the evenings (it's the future, right?), on the other the slick business folks with an arts background and enough experience to know where to steer the company/project/department. Neither wants to expend mental energy in the other's area of competence.
As software gets increasingly more complicated and moves up levels of abstraction, there is an ecosystem being created in the middle to bridge the two. A business-minded, but aware-of-computer-science middleman who translates from one end to the other, produces a clean functional spec from a messy, day long conversation with the user, or tells the CEO "sorry, that's not actually technically possible". One does not need to know category theory to be useful there.
Exactly the reason why I did a Bachelor in International Business Administration and a Master in Computer Science (Embedded Systems)! I feel that the gap in between is a good niche to be in. I have to say that there are some education programmes where the focus is on IT management that try to fill this niche too although I have some doubts about how effective it is to study IT management in itself.
As opposed to an animal person? So someone spent a few thousand words saying that emotional and inter-personal intelligence is a valuable skill to develop. Got it, thanks.
I find that some of my co-workers who work the best are ones that are not necessarily good at talking to others, but are good at shutting themselves out from others for periods of time, which helps them get lots of work done. The risky part being that sometimes they get a lot of work done in a totally wrong direction.
Yeah, I know a guy who quit and is planning on working at a grocery store. He's an amazing c++ dev (who did iOS) but got sick of everything else related.
One of the theories I have is that the best jobs in the U.S. require you to be culturally american. The U.S is great in that it is far more meritocratic than other countries but at the highest levels you still need to be culturally american.
This helps with things like understanding other people's motivations as well as day to day rapport which builds up into deep camaraderie.
People who are culturally un-american expend far more energy building rapport in this american way. (e.g. dealing with the "How's it going." exchange.)
The advantage is the the cultural natives don't need to wear "masks" while cultural non-natives are required to keep their masks on at the correct times, draining energy that could have been used for thinking/maneuvering.
Chinese and American culture for example have different default states for friendship amongst co-workers. Americans treat all people in a friendly manner but distinguish between co-workers and true friends. Friendship is not the default and is sought out based on mutual compatibility.
In Chinese culture though, friendship based on environment (school, work) IS the default. Through their eyes, American's are two faced while from the other side, they are just trying to avoid awkward forced friendship.
Another theory is that this difference in culture creates an exponential acquisition of skills in communication and selling yourself as well as avoiding awkward situations. Since these social skills are a constant part of life growing up, it is a natural strength in adult life.
Chinese culture tends to structure growth of their children in a "follow the rules, memorize all the textbooks" way so Chinese children only start their social skill education in adult life.
So to sum up...American culture creates people with stronger social skills because there isn't a "God" to tell you which road leads to heaven that you can diligently follow heads down. Immersion into American culture helps increase social skills the longer you are in it. Obvious acceptance of it (rather than avoidance) may make you seem more "coachable".
How does the dupe detector work anyway. First I thought one could resubmit after a certain amount of time... but no, I submitted this only a day or two ago. Maybe links can be modified (add a ?resubmit at the end, for instance), but nope, I submitted with exact same URI. I wonder. (Not complaining, just curious if anyone has insight into this).
[+] [-] simula67|10 years ago|reply
> nearly half of U.S. jobs would be vulnerable to automation within 20 years. But “computers aren’t good at simulating human interaction,” Deming said. That means a job as a manager or consultant is harder to automate, and the skills those jobs require become more valuable.
If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
> Women are getting jobs that require more social skills.
If the share of jobs that require interpersonal skill has in fact increased over the years just as the author postulates, is it really a wonder that share of women who hold these types of jobs have also increased ? Why exactly did the author show only the graph representing how the nature of jobs has changed for women ? Is the author trying to prove women are naturally better at these things ?
> Although cognitive skills don’t vary by gender, Deming cites research from psychology showing that women consistently score higher on tests of emotional intelligence and social perceptiveness.
This is a dangerous line of thinking. If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things. This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
[+] [-] mark_integerdsv|10 years ago|reply
Does anyone truly believe that this is not the case? People are different, sets of people differ along various, sometimes similar parameters.
>This could impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
It really shouldn't though. Differing from one subset of people should not impact your rights as a human being. 'Gender equality' doesn't mean that everyone should be 'the same' but rather that everyone should have equal rights.
Am I not getting this?
[+] [-] bitwize|10 years ago|reply
Who is naturally better at bearing children -- men or women?
Reality isn't gender-equal, or even finely balanced like a Starcraft game. Equality means equal rights, not equal abilities. (A strict belief in the latter gets us into Harrison Bergeron territory.)
If we're talking cognitive skills, there is rough equality in ability, but a difference in approach which makes one sex better for a particular job than the other. If women tend more to seek social consensus, for instance, they would fare better in a software engineering job with a high degree of peer collaboration, as opposed to the same job in a more "cowboy coding" environment.
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|10 years ago|reply
10 years ago at university a professor in economics told us that skills like design and social competence would become more important, as the actual tech would be outsourced to India or east europe, and focusing on tech would be unwise.
When I look at the programmer consulting rates, the opposite has happened. Glad I made the right choice.
[+] [-] omonra|10 years ago|reply
Good job comrade, drawing attention to someone (perhaps an innocent mistake - but we can't let these pass either) about to embark on danger-noticing and danger-think.
Hopefully you will stay vigilant and the offender will not relapse.
[+] [-] littletimmy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmir-alum-007|10 years ago|reply
Lower demand of workers and over-supply of candidates = employers' market = greater expectations placed on workers for lower pay. This would change nice-to-have attributes of excellent candidates from nice-to-have to compulsory as workers have to be even more perfect just to keep their job against the 100 other people lined up ready to take it from them. Besides, if there are 3 equally-qualified people with people skills and 5 without, it's a no brainer because the non-people-skilled folks are liabilities: they can kill the team dynamic, put people off and waste time & money (finding new coworkers to replace those that left whom will put up with their antics, finding new customers/vendors/partners/etc. that they put off, etc.). I know of a number of first-hand cases where some arrogant developers were passed over for hiring consideration at a successful enterprise startup because it was clear they would be too difficult to work with.
In labor markets with a foreseeable overabundance of talent, the future of work may include a number of people willing to work even longer for free, far longer than internships, simply to showcase their chops, get real experience and edge out other candidates/employees. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, but it certainly seems headed down that path.
[+] [-] kaitai|10 years ago|reply
Guys have their own pressures, of course, starting with the basic "don't cry" and "man up" and going from there. Imagine Lucy and Lionel scraping up their knees mildly on a rock: Lucy will get a lot of cuddles and hugs when she cries, and Lionel will be treated rather differently -- a range of responses from a briefer hug to "You're fine!" This definitely influences peoples' ideas of appropriate interpersonal interactions.
[+] [-] synthmeat|10 years ago|reply
Agreed. But what I put to even more suspicions are your arguments...
> If humans are being replaced with computers, then there will be need for fewer managers, supervisors etc. This would cause a decline in demand for people with "human skills" also.
No, when non-human tasks get delegated to non-humans, human skills will be where humans will be most needed, and this goes in line with data presented, and is fairly self-evident.
> Is the author trying to prove women are naturally better at these things?
Author gives research in support to that and you quote quotation of it yourself.
> If women are naturally better at certain things, it is not a stretch to imagine that they would be naturally worse at certain things.
There's no need to stretch anything, that's a fact. It is dangerous thinking, I agree. But so is atomic energy, AI, gene splicing... Besides being dangerous, it's also inevitable.
> This could be impede our quest to bring about gender equality.
I resent generalization our without further specification on who exactly.
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
"Naturally better" could also mean a result of survival bias. There are hundreds of reasons why there are more male physicists than female ones in the line of history. But we see more of them. So one simple (but as we know now incorrect) conclusion might be that men are better at physics. In the same regard we could observe more socially skilled females in the work place because these are the ones that make it there.
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
Ideally gender equality will be reached when we are judged by our own skills, without regard to our gender. Yes, a man may do better at X and a woman may do better by Y, but I'm hiring you because you are good at Z and I need someone good at Z and I don't care which gender is better in general, because you are the one I'm interviewing and you are good at Z.
[+] [-] jacalata|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] picardo|10 years ago|reply
It's more complex than that. Having natural ability does not mean those without that ability cannot excel in that area with hard work. Also, by the same token, some people with a lot of natural ability for certain things never take advantage of their talent because they never put the effort into realizing their potential.
So, in summary, acknowledging that natural ability is real does not give an automatic debating point to the other side of the argument because it's often the case that what you do with that innate talent will be more important.
[+] [-] Qwertious|10 years ago|reply
This doesn't cause a decline in jobs, any more than the decline of mainstream farming (90%+ of the population used to be farmers, but in the last few centuries it's less than 3%) caused the majority of the population to be unemployed.
What it causes is more jobs in other areas. Or alternatively, it makes everything more profitable and therefore allows the relevant companies to bloat themselves up needlessly with more layers of management, because they can afford it.
[+] [-] asgard1024|10 years ago|reply
Here's my answer to this paradox. The humans vs machines is just another "good old boys club". Of course humans don't want to relinquish control and be managed by machines, they are not silly. So they create another layer of "soft skills" which prevents from machines (or people who understand them) taking over.
Take a high-frequency trading company as an analog. The job is done by computers and technicians running them. Still, the CEO and investors into this are probably better paid than those technicians, and make all the important decisions. (In fact, today you could probably create a completely self-managed HFT company that would just put all the profit into hiring more technicians who manage its algorithms.)
And I think this was always the case in human history (although not against machines, just against other social groups); and many technical people here seem to be in denial of this reality. What we can do though is to attempt to change this, but it will require political, not technological, solutions (that is people skills).
[+] [-] swah|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|10 years ago|reply
No, it should inform our quest to bring about gender equality. We should be hiring people based on who they are as an individual, and not because of their gender or some quota, right? So if it's a fact that gender brings with it a tendency to be better / worse at different things, we shouldn't ignore it. Knowing the difference can help us measure when a statistical difference is explainable with gender-related tendencies, and when it's clearly because of discrimination. Trying to force a 50/50 split in cases where gender-related tendencies are significant seems silly to me.
edit: I do, however, agree that just dismissing something as "women are different" is bad, because people often fail to take into account what is an inherent chromosomal difference and what is because of stereotypes that people grew up with. So let's distinguish between biases and facts, but facts should not be considered "dangerous". It's what we do with the facts that matters.
[+] [-] donkeyd|10 years ago|reply
I think human skills remain important in order to figure out what the customer wants. Computers might do a lot of the work, but these computers still need to be programmed. You need to understand the customer's needs and translate these into a user friendly experience.
The essence of this change seems to be that it's 'easy' to program a computer. It's harder to know what to program so that people will want to use it.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] NumberCruncher|10 years ago|reply
"Even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15% of one's financial success is due one's technical knowledge and about 85% is due to skill in human engineering, to personality and the ability to lead people" - Dale Carnegie 1936
[+] [-] onion2k|10 years ago|reply
Maybe if you want a high paying job working for someone else then you should brush up on your 'soft skills'; but if money is really the driving force behind that decision then you'd be better off developing a fiercely ruthless attitude and starting a business of your own.
[+] [-] gjm11|10 years ago|reply
And I think you may be mixing up two things that could be meant by phrases like "people person". It could be that being nice isn't very effective in bringing dramatic success, but that *understanding people and being able to manipulate them" is.
(And ... very, very few people are Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Even if your goal is to get rich, you probably do better by asking "how can I get into the top 0.1% of the population by wealth" than by asking "how can I get into the top 10 of the population by wealth", and the answers to those might be quite different.)
[+] [-] dkarapetyan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omonra|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quaffapint|10 years ago|reply
At the end the CEO said if their is one thing he can recommend to all kids (I was ready for him to say take STEM classes), is for them to take public speaking. He said it's so critical for them to be able to properly share your ideas and listen to people. Quite interesting.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|10 years ago|reply
For many years I've expressed a belief that the only skill set that will remain viable throughout technological change is the ability to communicate. In simplified form, there are many friction points in social or commercial interactions which can be worsened by mis-communication or conflicting social norms. For example, certain cultures have very low opinions of women, and when expressed as though it's a norm in a different environment, that doesn't promote a successful outcome.
For a shorthand example, just check out advertising. Yes, there's a significant amount of data-driven research, and I know Google is at the top of this pile of...commerce...with its AdWords, so I take that to infer advertising is one of the most hit-or-miss areas where disruption was beneficial.
But here's the thing: Algorithms can't write jingles or colloquial slogans that will resonate with a particular audience. They can analyze them, but not create them, and I'm comfortable holding this belief until I see something which really revolutionizes technology in this field. I try to keep up with progress in conversational AI and the Turing Test challenge when I can, because I see that as the first major field where progress can be quantified and proven a success.
Oh, and this is legitimately tongue-in-cheek, but if you want to see a great example of what I mean, just look at the role of a Chief Executive Officer. They don't actually work as we might define it by input of labor, crunching numbers, or assembling information - they take loads of input, run it through their internal processor, then tell people what to do. They network, socialize, and communicate and for some reason, in the US, get paid vast sums of money for performing this role. I find it kind of funny and sad how high they're held in esteem, when realistically, they put in fewer hours, less effort, and reap rewards far greater than the run-of-the-mill high school teacher.
[+] [-] walshemj|10 years ago|reply
Worried that those greasy engineers might be getting to close them in terms of salary and status?
[+] [-] meric|10 years ago|reply
It is by achieving the essence of what it means to be human, a person is valued within human society.
[+] [-] benashford|10 years ago|reply
But notwithstanding the above, there are logical holes in the rest of the article. I won't even mention that slight on high-tech work by equating it to "plugging away at a spreadsheet".
The biggest flaw was the assumption that the automation to make the aforementioned spreadsheet obsolete would be done without those people. In reality, any person highly-paid to "plug away" at a spreadsheet would be paid due to their domain/industry knowledge and skills rather than purely Excel skills and would still be employed operating a new system, or even directly involved in building and maintaining such systems.
This pattern is repeated throughout the article. Technology will obsolete low-tech grunt work first, mainly because contrary to the central premise of that article, technology is a people business. It's not a people business in the same was sales or marketing is, it's not about who's got the biggest set of contacts[0], but you'll never build a successful product without understanding the world it fits in to; building good technology requires a good deal of listening and empathy, both toward the customer, but also to the system as a whole and your fellow engineers.
In the short-to-medium term, any acceleration in automation will also increase demand for engineers in that field. And any such systems will only be as good as those who made them, even knowledge-workers not in the automation business will still be required to operate/design/improve such systems. Maybe in smaller numbers...
What happens after that, no one knows. The effects on the economy would be difficult to predict. And one day in ten, fifty, a hundred, several thousand years from now, fully autonomous AI will be here... and all bets are off. Long-term predictions would be foolish.
[0] - except for the sale and marketing of a technology business, of course, it's not a binary situation.
[+] [-] Simp|10 years ago|reply
Who says "social skills" can't be automated?
> But “computers aren’t good at simulating human interaction,”
Not yet you mean.
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|10 years ago|reply
there are engineering needs for a hundred years or more* to transform current work centered society in an automation centered society, and even then those things won't just maintain themselves forever.
*not because technical challenges, but because the resistance from who detains the status quo
[+] [-] ComteDeLaFere|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codyb|10 years ago|reply
http://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/can-introvert-be-great-entre...
[+] [-] matthewowen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crdb|10 years ago|reply
As software gets increasingly more complicated and moves up levels of abstraction, there is an ecosystem being created in the middle to bridge the two. A business-minded, but aware-of-computer-science middleman who translates from one end to the other, produces a clean functional spec from a messy, day long conversation with the user, or tells the CEO "sorry, that's not actually technically possible". One does not need to know category theory to be useful there.
[+] [-] hekker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarapetyan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smegel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheGRS|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seivan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlwj|10 years ago|reply
This helps with things like understanding other people's motivations as well as day to day rapport which builds up into deep camaraderie.
People who are culturally un-american expend far more energy building rapport in this american way. (e.g. dealing with the "How's it going." exchange.)
The advantage is the the cultural natives don't need to wear "masks" while cultural non-natives are required to keep their masks on at the correct times, draining energy that could have been used for thinking/maneuvering.
Chinese and American culture for example have different default states for friendship amongst co-workers. Americans treat all people in a friendly manner but distinguish between co-workers and true friends. Friendship is not the default and is sought out based on mutual compatibility.
In Chinese culture though, friendship based on environment (school, work) IS the default. Through their eyes, American's are two faced while from the other side, they are just trying to avoid awkward forced friendship.
Another theory is that this difference in culture creates an exponential acquisition of skills in communication and selling yourself as well as avoiding awkward situations. Since these social skills are a constant part of life growing up, it is a natural strength in adult life.
Chinese culture tends to structure growth of their children in a "follow the rules, memorize all the textbooks" way so Chinese children only start their social skill education in adult life.
So to sum up...American culture creates people with stronger social skills because there isn't a "God" to tell you which road leads to heaven that you can diligently follow heads down. Immersion into American culture helps increase social skills the longer you are in it. Obvious acceptance of it (rather than avoidance) may make you seem more "coachable".
[+] [-] _pmf_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juddlyon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draven|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pen2l|10 years ago|reply