Daniela Amodei, who cofounded Anthropic with her brother Dario, said uniquely human qualities will actually be more critical in the age of AI, not less.
“I continue to believe that humans plus AI together actually create more meaningful work, more challenging work, more interesting work, high-productivity jobs,” Amodei added. “And then I think it will also open the aperture to a lot of access and opportunity for many people.”
That doesn’t mean the future employment landscape will require a technical background. Indeed, the release of Anthropic’s latest AI-coding tools sparked a massive selloff among tech stocks this past week as the technical expertise needed to write and maintain code is expected to fall sharply.
“The things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important,” she told ABC News. “And what I mean by that is when we look to hire people at Anthropic today, we look for people who are great communicators, who have excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious and want to help other people.”
While AI will still eliminate some jobs, young people should lean into critical thinking and communication skills, including how to write well and how to perform well in a meeting. If they can get those right, “You’ll have plenty of jobs,” he said in December.
At the end of the day, Amodei said, people still enjoy interacting with other humans, with very smart and capable AI complementing them.
“I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever,” she explained. “A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM. But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human—understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick—I think that will always be really, really important. And I think the ability to have critical thinking skills and learn how to interact with other people will be more important in the future, rather than less.”
To be sure, more Gen Zers are abandoning college as a necessary step in a successful career path, turning instead to trade schools and working in hands-on fields like manufacturing, construction and maintenance.
But for those still on the white-collar track, other tech leaders have similarly highlighted the importance of soft skills.
