The Human Edge in an AI World
Artificial intelligence may be rewriting workplace rules, but humans still hold the advantage if they embrace the right skills
By far, the biggest concern around AI is how it might impact jobs. “Is my job safe?” and “Will my children find jobs in the age of AI?” are common refrains today. This is not surprising, since AI is a cognitive technology, perhaps the first tool we have invented that mimics our brain. Thus, it has abilities and expertise that we consider uniquely human—creativity, art, writing, mathematics and coding. Thus, it ignites a primal fear of loss of livelihood, relevance and one’s place in society.
These questions are certainly not being asked for the first time. Every time a revolutionary new technology is unleashed, the same thought fearfully raises its head. It bothered Ned Ludd in 1779 when the spinning jenny was invented, as it threatened to take his job as a textile factory apprentice. He went and smashed a machine or two, catalysing a campaign against textile technology, and started the Luddite movement.
New-age Luddites worried about PCs and their job-destroying potential; this movement was particularly strident in India with computers being smashed by workers’ unions. We were apprehensive that computers would replace accountants, clerks, secretaries, teachers, consultants and scores of others. The reality, as it turned out, was quite different: the PC and the Internet did destroy a few jobs, but created millions more, and today we cannot imagine our life without them; the IT revolution not only created new jobs, but also catapulted India into a tech superpower.
As the GenAI tidal wave sweeps across industries and offices, we strongly believe that it will affect corporate work more than anything else. We often do not consider work an industry—though it is a several trillion dollar one—and confuse work with jobs. We are rightly worried about how AI will impact jobs, but tend to neglect how it will impact work. But we need to look at AI and jobs in a nuanced way, and we do so through fou...
By far, the biggest concern around AI is how it might impact jobs. “Is my job safe?” and “Will my children find jobs in the age of AI?” are common refrains today. This is not surprising, since AI is a cognitive technology, perhaps the first tool we have invented that mimics our brain. Thus, it has abilities and expertise that we consider uniquely human—creativity, art, writing, mathematics and coding. Thus, it ignites a primal fear of loss of livelihood, relevance and one’s place in society.
These questions are certainly not being asked for the first time. Every time a revolutionary new technology is unleashed, the same thought fearfully raises its head. It bothered Ned Ludd in 1779 when the spinning jenny was invented, as it threatened to take his job as a textile factory apprentice. He went and smashed a machine or two, catalysing a campaign against textile technology, and started the Luddite movement.
New-age Luddites worried about PCs and their job-destroying potential; this movement was particularly strident in India with computers being smashed by workers’ unions. We were apprehensive that computers would replace accountants, clerks, secretaries, teachers, consultants and scores of others. The reality, as it turned out, was quite different: the PC and the Internet did destroy a few jobs, but created millions more, and today we cannot imagine our life without them; the IT revolution not only created new jobs, but also catapulted India into a tech superpower.
As the GenAI tidal wave sweeps across industries and offices, we strongly believe that it will affect corporate work more than anything else. We often do not consider work an industry—though it is a several trillion dollar one—and confuse work with jobs. We are rightly worried about how AI will impact jobs, but tend to neglect how it will impact work. But we need to look at AI and jobs in a nuanced way, and we do so through four lenses:
AI will indeed eliminate some jobs
Since the Agricultural Revolution, every successful new technology invented has supplanted some jobs. The IC engine made horse and buggy drivers obsolete, computers and Microsoft’s productivity software meant we did not need typists any more and telephone switchboard operators and lamplighters became a quaint symbol of the past. So, if you are a journalist who only summarizes stories into short, digestible bits or an average software programmer who builds payroll software, you better start thinking of something else to do! As the GenAI express train rolls into organizations, these jobs are increasingly threatened; cases in point are Vodafone, which wants to cut jobs by nearly half and use AI instead, and IBM, which has halted certain kinds of recruitment for the same reason.
There are certain jobs that AI and GenAI won’t replace
Business magnate and former President of Google China, Kai Fu Lee has this to say: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” So, an AI like DALL.E 2 might be able to paint like Picasso, but it cannot do what even infants can—such as crawling around, responding to a mother’s smile, feeling affectionate. As Lee wrote, jobs that require human emotions like love or compassion will never be taken over by AI. So, if you are an elderly care worker, a nurse, a construction worker, a farmer or anyone engaged in manual, caring, compassionate work, your job is safe from GenAI. So far, at least.
AI will create new jobs
Every single technology since the Agricultural Revolution has created more jobs than it has destroyed. At this time, we can’t be sure what these new jobs are, and how many there might be. Spinning jennies required operators, the PC created tech jobs of all kinds—so will AI and GenAI. An emerging role is a “prompt engineer”. While tinkering with ChatGPT or Claude, you would have noticed that the answer is as good as the prompt given, and a prompt engineer will have the skills to write the best prompts, marrying knowledge of language with some domain expertise. Another emerging profession is that of the AI ethicist, with AI’s thorny ethical dilemmas spinning out multiple such roles in companies worldwide. Maybe there will be a new kind of role with an expertise in the equivalent of an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) for GenAI. We also see an ORM (Online Reputation Management) for ChatGPT, so that it says good things about you, your restaurant or just Indian food in general.
About 60 per cent of all jobs will be impacted in some way or the other by AI
Multiple GenAI tools write excellent content and copy, but many times it just hallucinates, since it is optimized for plausibility, not truth. But using AI, a copywriter can generate some initial content ideas for your restaurant very quickly and then refine them. Software programmers are using GitHub Copilot or Claude or Cursor to write code faster. Artists and graphic designers are using it to brainstorm art ideas for making collateral and visual content. The possibilities are endless, and this is where we see AI shine—not by doing your work but making you more creative and productive.
And so, the core belief bears repeating: it is not AI that will replace you, but a human being using AI. An interview with Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, brought home to us the most profound effect that AI will have; it will teach us how to be human in the age of AI. In it, Omar Al Olama, the UAE’s AI Minister, asks Huang what people should teach themselves and their kids in the age of AI. Huang gives a counterintuitive answer, saying that most people think that we should all learn computer science and AI programming, but we should in fact be doing exactly the opposite. With AI, he says, it is the tech companies’ job to create computing technology so that no one has to programme. Instead, everyone in the world becomes a programmer.
Thus, the greatest revolution brought about by AI and GenAI is that the gap between human and machine will close completely. In this era, we will engage with computers in human languages like English, Bengali or Spanish and not esoteric ones like C++, Python or PHP, languages of the machines. Technical and data skills that have been highly sought after for decades appear to be among the most exposed to advances in artificial intelligence.
But other skills, particularly the people skills that we have long undervalued as soft, will very likely remain the most durable. The knowledge economy will give way to the relationship economy. As Minouche Shafik of Columbia University says: “In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”
Edited excerpt from Winning with AI: Your Guide To AI Literacy by Jaspreet Bindra and Anuj Magazine, Published by Juggernaut Books, Copyright © Jaspreet Bindra and Anuj Magazine 2025