According to a 2020 report by the World Economic Forum, it is estimated that by 2025, automation and AI could displace 85 million jobs worldwide. Tools like ChatGPT have become so ubiquitous in a professional’s life that in fact, I had a lot of help in crafting this article and saved so much of my time.

Take for example the above figures. Previously, I had to do a Google search, scrolled through pages and pages of results to find a good search and read through the entire article to find the stats I needed. However, look at this screenshot of my question to Poe.com. Blam! All that I need is right in front of me.

However, I noticed right away that the result was a little outdated. So, I immediately switched to using Bing’s AI copilot. Unlike ChatGPT which has its training only from data before 2021, Bing is still connected to the internet and thus showed the numbers at 3.5x more at 300 million.

Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) like those used by OpenAI are known to hallucinate at times and give false results or answers. So when I find the results a little dubious, I will at least double-check it with another AI tool such as you.com or Google’s Bard, or even go back to Google search to find the appropriate article or report to look at the stats.

Also read: ‘Not all is doom and gloom’: Experts on the potential of AI to steal jobs in SEA

How you ask the question is also important. For example, I asked Bing the following, “Chatgpt is one of the fastest growing apps”, and this was what came back.

Meta’s Thread is, at the point of writing, actually the fastest-growing app – taking just 5 days to reach 100 million users. Here’s a fun fact: Within seven months of launching on May 25, 2007, Pornhub reached 1 million daily visitors, which was a huge achievement in those days.

Like it or not, AI is like a genie that is out of the bottle and impossible to put back. It will be a huge part of our lives- from healthcare to banking, from transportation to education- and its influence is likely to grow in the coming years.

As powerful as it is, AI has its limitations and likely for decades, it will not be able to compete with a few critical human skills that will make you harder to be replaced if you hone them well:

Common sense an EQ

AI is certainly stronger than humans in many areas. For example, in a 2018 study published in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers found that an AI system could accurately detect breast cancer from mammogram images with an accuracy rate of 94.5 per cent, which was higher than the accuracy rate of human radiologists in the study.

But take, for example, my earlier result of the fastest-growing app above. Someone with some knowledge of Meta’s Thread would have spotted it was the wrong question to ask and would also reject the answer. It takes common sense to detect that the first screenshot’s result was outdated and to ask the right question at the right place and the right time (though I always felt common sense is not that common at all).

It also takes common sense to know that AI beating doctors and radiologists is more interesting than say, stats of AI beating humans in counting the number of cars on a road and using it in the article.

Emotional Intelligence

As a professional, have you had a colleague who texted you while you were on medical leave or vacation? During Covid, many companies shifted to remote work and instead of walking up to someone’s desk to ask about something, many of us got used to texting, emails and calls.

That means out of sight no longer means out of mind, which previously would have suggested that someone was not working that day. With remote or hybrid work here to stay for many companies, it takes emotional intelligence to just recall at the back of your mind if someone is working that day, and if texting or calling him or her will be disturbing their rest.

Creativity

In the age of AI, data can be generated and arranged into various charts in a matter of a few clicks. But a human still has to be creative and decide among the many metrics, what the really important ones are to measure and look at and which are the vanity metrics.

Another AI tool I have been using is Grammarly. Especially when writing articles like this to proofread my grammar. While it has not taken the internet by storm like the GPTs have, it is still an AI-powered writing assistant which I have been using for many years, where it uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to analyse text and provide suggestions for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style.

Also read: How my entrepreneurial failures led me to rethink learning and upskilling

But it still takes human creativity to think of what an interesting topic to even cover is and how to frame them. (If you enjoy this article, then a human must have done a good job. If you share this article with someone else, then a human would have done a great job. If you are still thinking about the stats on Pornhub or telling it to someone else, then a human would have done a wonderful job.)

Recently, Mr Khailee Ng from 500 Startups asked these questions in his recent LinkedIn post: “Who gets promoted or paid more? Who shouldn’t? What kind of work skill will be most valuable as technology accelerates?” He believes “Doing, Decisioning, Driving” and progressing from one to another makes one more affluent in life and I would agree too.

With productivity being able to be increased so much more with good use of AI, I believe that trying to compete by “Doing” more would be harder and harder to differentiate a manager or employee from another. Instead, common sense, emotional intelligence & creativity will be some of the skills that will help in setting one apart.

That said, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Taking advantage of AI and the many things it can offer- while one continues to hone “the human skills”- could be good common sense too.

As a non-tech founder running a fintech startup, I was able to be more involved in the early part of the business when we were building our loan marketplace. Being able to ask ChatGPT what certain terminologies meant- where it offered explanations in a condensed and easy-to-understand paragraph or two instead of reading books or articles – allowed me to understand what my developers were referring to.

In fact, a couple of times, I was able to prompt ChatGPT well enough to generate some codes to propose to my guys other ways of doing some things that we were stuck on. Of course, this doesn’t mean I can start jumping in and working alongside them. But I was definitely able to jump in from time to time and offer different ways of looking at things.

AI has also helped us in, for example, our ads. Although we have part-time designers and copywriters, generating enough ideas needs to come first before we can tell them what to do for us. For example, I asked ChatGPT, “When would someone want to use a loan marketplace instead of approaching the lenders one by one?” This is what it generated for me.

If you think this is an extremely intelligent product placement, again this is human creativity.

Artificial Intelligence is definitely something that many feel apprehensive or even defensive about. Today, you would think nothing of it if an employer needs you to have some basic computer usage skills. You wouldn’t think that is another wrong or excessive. One day, using AI at work would be just like it. It’s just another tool. You, the human, are what matters.

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