Humans Need Not Apply

Abstract

Advanced technologies including artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning (smart machines) impact understandings about the nature of work. For professionals, semi-professionals, and ancillary workers supplying healthcare and legal services, for example, smart machines change the social relations of work and subvert notions of status and hierarchy that come with occupational groups such as doctors or lawyers. As smart machines continue to disrupt employment, job advertisement might soon carry the warning that humans need not apply. Under the prospect of a new world of work, people require additional knowledge, skills, and attitudes to cope with a future where smart machines radically alter the nature of work in settings where some people work anywhere and anytime while others work nowhere. In any future, people require skills and attitudes to cope with uncertainty. Ideas about multiple intelligences, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving will help employees cope with any of the futures of work predicted in the literature.