SPEAKING.APP

I was in my mid-twenties the first time I realized I could be replaced by a robot. At the time, I was a financial reporter covering Wall Street and the stock market. One day I heard about this new AI reporting app. You could feed it data, like a corporate financial report or a database of real estate listings, and it would strip out the important parts, plug them into a template, and publish a news story with basically no human input. These apps were not going to win any Pulitzer Prizes. But they were shockingly effective. Major news organizations were already using them. One company said its AI had been used to write three hundred million news stories in a single year, which is slightly more than me, and probably more than every human journalist on Earth combined. For the last few years, I’ve been researching this coming wave of AI and automation. What happened to me is happening to workers in all kinds of industries, no matter how prestigious or high-paid their jobs seem. Doctors are learning that machine learning algorithms can diagnose certain cancers more accurately than they can. Lawyers are facing legal AIs that can spot issues in contracts with better precision than they can. And at Google, they even ran an experiment with an AI that trains neural networks, essentially a robot that makes other robots. They found the AI-trained neural networks were more accurate than the ones their human programmers had coded. But the most disturbing thing I learned is that we’ve been preparing for this automated future in exactly the wrong way. For years the conventional wisdom has been: if technology is the future, then get as close to the technology as possible. Learn to code. Study hard skills like data science, engineering, and math. And the soft skills people, the artists and writers and philosophers, were just going to end up serving coffee to our robot overlords. What I learned is that essentially the opposite is true. Rather than trying to compete with machines, we should be trying to improve our human skills. The kinds of things only people can do. Things involving compassion and critical thinking and moral courage. When we do our jobs, we should try to do them as humanely as possible. For me, that meant putting more of myself into my work. I stopped writing formulaic corporate earnings stories and started writing things that revealed more of my personality. I started a financial poetry series. I wrote profiles of quirky and interesting people on Wall Street, like the barber who cuts people’s hair at Goldman Sachs. I even convinced my editor to let me live like a billionaire for a day, wearing a thirty-thousand-dollar watch and driving around in a Rolls-Royce, flying in a private jet. Tough job, but someone’s got to do it. And I felt more optimistic about my future, because you can teach a robot to summarize the news, or write a headline that gets clicks from Google or Facebook. But you can’t automate making someone laugh with a dumb limerick about the bond market. You can’t automate explaining what a collateralized debt obligation is without making someone fall asleep. As I kept researching, I found the same pattern over and over. People succeed by refusing to compete with machines on the machines’ terms, and instead making themselves more human. Take Russ Garofalo, my accountant. Russ is not a traditional accountant. He’s a former stand-up comedian, and he brings that sensibility to his work. I swear I’ve had more fun talking about itemized deductions with Russ than at actual comedy shows I’ve paid real money to see. Russ knows that in the age of TurboTax, the only way for human accountants to stay relevant is to bring something to the table besides tax expertise. So he started a company called Brass Taxes. Get it. He hired other funny, personable accountants and looked for clients in creative industries who’d value having a human being walk them through their taxes. Technically, I should be worried about Russ. Tax preparation is highly automation-prone. According to an Oxford University study, it has a ninety-nine percent chance of being automated. But I’m not worried about Russ, because he’s turned tax preparation from a chore into an entertaining, human experience that people, including me, are willing to pay for. Or take Mitsuru Kawai. Sixty years ago, Mitsuru started as a junior trainee at a Toyota factory in Japan, making car parts by hand. This was the 1960s, when the auto industry was going through a huge technological transformation. The first factory robots were coming onto assembly lines, and a lot of people worried auto workers were going to become obsolete. Mitsuru decided to focus on what’s called monozukuri, basically human craftsmanship. He studied the nuanced, intricate details of auto design and developed almost a sixth sense that few colleagues had. He could listen to a machine and tell when it was about to break. He could look at a piece of metal and know its temperature by the shade of orange it was glowing. His bosses noticed those skills and realized they made him valuable, because he could work alongside robots, filling in the gaps and doing what they couldn’t do. He kept getting promoted. And this year, Mitsuru Kawai was named Toyota’s first ever Chief Monozukuri Officer, in recognition of the sixty years he spent teaching Toyota workers that even in a highly automated industry, their human skills still matter. And then there’s Marcus Books, a small, independent, Black-owned bookstore in my hometown of Oakland, California. It’s the oldest Black-owned bookstore in America. For sixty years it’s introduced Oaklanders to writers like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. But the most amazing thing about Marcus Books is that it’s still here. So many independent bookstores have gone out of business because of Amazon and the internet. So how did Marcus Books do it. Not by having the lowest prices. Not by having the slickest e-commerce setup. Not by having the most optimized supply chain. Marcus Books is more than a bookstore. It’s a community gathering place where generations of Oaklanders have gone to learn and grow. It’s a safe place where Black customers know they won’t be followed around or patted down by a security guard. As Blanche Richardson, one of the owners, told me, “It just has good vibes.” Earlier this year, Marcus Books temporarily closed, and its future was uncertain. They were raising money on GoFundMe. Then George Floyd was killed. The streets filled with protests, and orders poured in from all over the country. First a hundred books a day, then two hundred, then three hundred. Today they’re selling five times as many books as they were before the pandemic. Their GoFundMe has raised more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And if you read the comments on that GoFundMe page, you see why they survived. One person wrote, “We have a duty to preserve gems like this in our community.” Someone else said, “I’ve been going to Marcus Books since I was a child, and Blanche Richardson showed me many kindnesses.” Gems. Kindnesses. Those aren’t words about technology. They’re not even words about books. They’re words about people. The thing that saved Marcus Books was how they made customers feel. An experience, not a transaction. If you, like me, sometimes worry about your place in an automated future, you have a few options. You can try to compete with the machines. You can work long hours. You can turn yourself into a sleek, efficient productivity machine. Or you can focus on your humanity. You can do the things machines can’t do, and bring those human skills to whatever your work is. If you’re a doctor, work on your bedside manner, so patients come to see you as their friend, not just their medical provider. If you’re a lawyer, work on your trial skills and your client interactions, rather than just cranking out briefs and contracts all day. If you’re a programmer, spend time with the people who actually use your products. Figure out what their problems are, and try to solve them, rather than just hitting next quarter’s growth targets. That’s how we become future-proof. Not by taking on the machines, but by excelling in the areas where humans have a natural advantage. By living and working more like humans, we can make ourselves impossible to replace. And the good news is we don’t have to learn a single line of code or deploy a single algorithm. In fact, you already have everything you need. Thank you.