Column: Artificial intelligence becomes artificial connection, too - The Daily Tar Heel
By Google News AI ·
Walking through Davis Library, the amount of LLMs one can see visible on laptop screens — calculating, contemplating, thinking — is shocking. I look around the library and wonder what skills will be relevant in the future when students rely on artificial intelligence to complete their schoolwork.
As I’m starting to enter more spaces where people are looking toward post-grad jobs — aka “real jobs” — I’m consistently given the same advice: stay human, stay authentic, keep your soft skills. Soft skills have always mattered, but as AI levels the technical playing field, soft skills and authenticity have become the next scarce resource, and companies will find a way to extract them. By participating in this, we optimize and sell our authenticity and humanity, something defined by being raw and unfiltered.
This trend toward the performance of authenticity is currently rampant in areas heavily influenced by AI — namely, prestige careers, the creator economy and startups.
AI will only become more competent at technical tasks, such as financial modeling, screening data and coding. Even companies that don’t replace workers will expect more from the ones they keep. This is apparent in prestige fields, such as investment banking, where employers aren’t cutting entry-level analysts, but expecting them to use AI tools to efficiently complete work that would have taken longer before.
As AI turns technical competence into a requisite baseline, it begins to affect hiring. There must be some sort of distinguishing factor for candidates, so prestige careers rely on soft skills in the selection process. One of these soft skills is likeability.
In the investment banking and recruiting timelines, the coffee chat has become a fixture. I have heard the importance of originality and…
Originally published by Google News AI