Future-Proofing Your Career: How to Choose College Skills AI Can’t Replace

Business people using artificial intelligence (AI) Automation.Photo bySutthiphong / Adobe Stock

With ChatGPT and other bots powered by artificial intelligence capturing the public imagination with their spectacular ability to parse user queries, gather relevant information online, and put it together in very convincinglanguage, public discourse has raged over the potential of this technology to render humans obsolete in many different kinds of job roles.

A number of popular websites, Bankrate and CNET among them, have already admitted to using AI-powered bots to write their articles for them. On these websites, AI is already displacing human writers. If you’re in the workforce right now, you may wonder whether you could have made different kinds of choices in collegeto be better positioned to fight the threat posed by AI.

If you’re young, however, and contemplating college, you could do something now about your future marketability. You could aim to gain skills that truly make use of areas of human strength (and AI weakness). You want skillsets that are unlikely to be taken over by artificial intelligence in thefuture. Classes in the humanities and the sciences are likely to equip you well. What kind of classes, exactly, should you take in college to help you develop uniquely human strengths, however?

Pick classes that help you develop your own intellectual voice

Chatbots like ChatGPT make good typists but not good writers. They’re able to scour the internet for information to satisfy most queries and put it together in a reasonable-sounding way. However, what they say often comes off sounding like boring corporate speak. It can help, therefore, to take college courses that help youstudy the mostdistinctive voices known —James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and so on— in an attempt to use these examples anddevelop your own distinctive voice. AI isn’t good at interesting, distinctive voices.

Pick classes that help you learn to connect to people

While AI is adequate in its ability toput information together and give it to people in an intelligible form, it isn’t able to give it to them in a way they find interesting. Finding college courses that help you develop your ability to present information in ways that audiences connect to, and get excitedenough about to want to participate, could make sure that AI never threatens your career.

Pick classes that challenge you to do something new

Whatever subject you decide to take classes in, it can be a good idea to find ones with teachers who have a reputation for pushing their students to come up with new ideas. Teachers who challenge the approach their students bring to information absorption can help them understand how to be creative.

Pick classes that teach you to think in unpredictable ways

AI is great at looking at pre-existing sentence patterns and using those patterns to predict what people might say next. A great way to make sure AI doesn’t threaten your career, then, would be to develop the ability to say things that aren’t predictable. Taking classes in Epicureanism, Taoism, and other novel worldviews could help you gain insights into being an unpredictable thinker that AI is never able to mimic.

Pick classes that help you understand people

Machines can be great at laying down behavioral patterns that show up in populations of millions. They’re unable, however, to understand what aspecific person thinks or wants. Understanding individual behaviors, rather than the behaviors of populations, is a human forte.Pick classes that build on this ability. Classes in the humanities — history, literature, and drama — can help you understand the different ways that people think, and try these insights on individuals that you meet to see if they make a good fit. This can be a valuable skill in a world powered by AI that knows a lot of things about populations but nothing about individuals.

The arrival of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence bots brings new urgency to the question of staying relevant in the job market of the future. A young person planning on college today needs to work outwhat skills will make them AI-proof in the future.

AI can be a hugely useful tool, and employers are likely to apply it everywhere they can. The trick to remaining relevant, then, may come down to finding out where employees will never be able to apply AI.

With the tips discussed, you should be able to smell out the areas that are uniquely human and promise to remain so for the foreseeable future.