LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer on how to get ahead in the age of AI |
LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer on how to get ahead in the age of AI
In a conversation about his new book, LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman talked about why soft skills have new relevance in the era of AI.
[Images: PaleStudio/Adobe Stock]
Many tech observers initially believed the software engineers would become scarce in the face of AI. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case—in part due to the power of human ingenuity.
“Software engineers are spending less time coding,” says Aneesh Raman, the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, who just published the book Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI. “But now they’re getting to build things in a way they couldn’t before. They’re going into conversations with clients and customers. Or they’re thinking about the ethical implications of what they build.”
In their book, Raman and his co-author—LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky—argue that there’s no point trying to beat AI at its own game and “out-machine” a machine. Instead, workers who are concerned about being unseated by AI should focus on what they bring to the table that cannot be automated.
“One of the biggest arguments we make in the book is: Jobs are not titles,” he says. “They’re a set of tasks.” Raman sorts those tasks into three buckets. One of those buckets includes the tasks you can automate or simplify with AI; the second bucket might be new things you can do by harnessing AI. But the most crucial bucket is the last one, which involves what is “unique to you as a human.”
“No one beats you at being you,” Raman says. “Not even AI.”
It is these skills that have currency in the era of AI, according to Raman. Soft skills, which are often undervalued, have new relevance as AI erodes the value of technical prowess. “For generations now, we have valued technical and analytic abilities above all else,” he says. “And we have described these people skills—these human skills—as soft in a very dismissive way. The script is about to flip.”
In their book, Raman and Roslansky sought to better articulate what constitutes soft skills, enlisting neuroscientists, psychologists, and behavioral economists to do so. They came up with the five Cs (curiosity, compassion, creativity, communication, and courage) to capture the qualities that AI “can help us with but can’t beat us at.”
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