The Case For Emotional Education For An AI Economy

When the AI company Anthropic unveiled its latest suite of enterprise tools earlier this year, investors did not need long to grasp the implications.The new products included plugins capable of reviewing contracts and carrying out legal workflows that would once have required considerable human time. Within a single day, an estimated $285 billion had been wiped from the value of software stocks around the world.The market appeared to reach a blunt conclusion. Technical work is becoming cheaper.Yet only days later, Anthropic president and cofounder Daniela Amodei offered a rather different view of what the company itself values when recruiting people."The things that make us human will become much more important," she told ABC News.Anthropic looks for strong communicators with "excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious," she explained. It wants people who are motivated by helping others. Despite the rapid progress of AI, Amodei believes the number of jobs it can perform entirely without human involvement remains "vanishingly small."This was not simply a reassuring line from an AI executive trying to soften an unsettling product launch.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a similar argument during an appearance on the MD Meets podcast in November. As AI takes on more analytical and technical work, he suggested, empathy and emotional intelligence will become more valuable rather than less.JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon echoed the point on Fox News the following month. His advice to young people was to develop "critical thinking, learn skills, learn your EQ," while also learning to write clearly and contribute effectively in meetings.A pattern is emerging.The people building and deploying workplace automation increasingly describe their ideal employee in terms that sound less like a computer science course and more like a lesson in human development.The Research Points In The Same DirectionThe evidence largely supports what these...