How to be irreplaceable in the era of AI 

If you’re worried about being replaced by a bot, you aren’t alone. According to a study from EY, three-quarters of workers are concerned that AI will make jobs obsolete, and about two-thirds are worried that their jobs specifically will be eliminated.  While it’s natural to fear being replaced by automation, there are certain qualities that humans have that can make them irreplaceable, says Pascal Bornet, author of Irreplaceable: The Art of Standing Out in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “I’ve focused my research on the intersection between humans and AI,” says Bornet, founder and former leader of “AI and Automation” practices at McKinsey and Ernst & Young. “AI is built by people for people. If you remove the human element in AI, it remains something that is useless. Artificial intelligence brings a lot of value, but this value is towards humans.” To become irreplaceable, Bornet says you need to embrace and implement three “ready” competencies that will be necessary in the future.  Human-Ready Some human abilities, such as our personality, life story, emotions, and authenticity, are uniquely human, and technology cannot replace them. Called “humics,” Bornet likes to illustrate how they work by thinking about kids playing in a sandbox.  “Kids build elaborate structures and create new games regularly,” he says. “They are architects of their imaginative realms. ChatGPT creates stories, but it is not the same type of creativity. What we bring as humans is novelty.” Kids also discuss the rules of the game, deciding what’s good and what isn’t. This form of critical thinking is a second humic in being human-ready. “No technology will ever tell us what is good or what is bad,” Bornet says. “The design of ethics can only come from humans.”  Kids also have the human ability to connect, such as inviting a newcomer into their game. Bornet calls this humic social authenticity.  “There is no one better than a human to understand another human,” he says. “It’s about connection, empathy, and communication. ChatGPT may talk to you the same way as a human would, but it does not understand any of the words it gives you. It’s a program based on probabilistic analysis where this word should come after the next and the next.”  Being human-ready is innate. Parents don’t teach kids how to play, create rules, and connect; they just do. The abilities can be developed and brought to a new level to make humans as different as possible from technology and from AI.  AI-Ready The next capability that will make you irreplaceable is to become AI-ready. The future is about using technology the right way, seizing all the benefits you can get from it through automation and augmentation of your capabilities. Instead of being a tool that outsmarts you, AI should assist you, providing benefits like efficiency, value, and balance. To be AI-ready you need to become aware of its downsides, pitfalls, and dangers. For example, if not used ethically, AI technologies can become distractions, create addictions, and breach data privacy. Artificial intelligence can also introduce biases, depending on what information it’s fed. “It’s not about being tech-savvy; it’s about being a tech-wise person,” says Bornet. “It’s about using AI responsibly.” Change-Ready The final competency of the future is being change-ready. We live in a world that is changing at an exponential pace. “What we will see in the next 10 years will be as many technological innovations as we’ve seen in the last century,” says Bornet. “We need to be ready, resilient, and adaptable. A critical component is that we need to master the cycle of learning, unlearning, and relearning.” The life span of our skills has decreased dramatically over the past three decades and continues to shrink, Bornet says, noting that as workers, humans will have less time to adapt and train to new skills. It’s important to relearn how to learn. Being change-ready is something humans have always done as a species; however, we need to bring it to a new level of intensity.  “Technology has always enabled us to bring all the good that we have today—the capacity to solve problems, to heal people, to save lives,” he says. “But it’s also being aware of the downside of those new features and being able to mitigate the risks. If we don’t combine our capabilities with the capabilities of technology, we get replaced, we become redundant, and we don’t create value. Take this as an opportunity to be more human.”