6 Skills That Won't Be Replaced By AI Until 2030+

I think a lot of people are rightfully worried about how to futureproof themselves against developments in AI technology. So, in this video, I wanted to cover six skills that I don't believe are going to be replaced by AI by 2030. And I'm saying 2030 here because I do think that eventually models are just going to outperform humans at most economically valuable tasks. I don't really see any alternative where that isn't the case. So, what I'm really concerned about is just the next few years. How do we get to that point while still remaining economically viable? And the markets are shifting a lot right now and they're going to continue to shift. So, I think understanding all this stuff is very important. The first major skill that I would focus on if I were starting from scratch and I had not made all of this money using AI and automation would

be agency under uncertainty. Now it's funny because agent is a term that people use to describe AI systems now. But agency is basically your ability to act. Okay? So cultivating this skill then is cultivating your ability to act void of some external trigger or stimulus. If you're the sort of person that can act and if you can do it consistently without being 100% certain about what it is that you're doing paying off, maybe being 70% certain or something, you will succeed. And there are a couple of reasons for this. The main one is that the value of knowledge in the AI era is decreasing. Okay? And the complexity of things in general is increasing. So if this is knowledge and this is complexity, well the natural conclusion to this is that if you waited to be 100% certain about increasingly complex systems and that knowledge itself grew less valuable over time, waiting until that point is just a losers game. So the winners instead they get to a point where they're reasonably confident that what they're going to do is going to work and then they just start acting. Okay? And they act consistently and they act often and sometimes they act recklessly for long periods of time. So this is an AI generated image of supposedly some pretty ripped looking dude doing that. Now if you are a person with high agency, you're the sort of person that takes initiative without waiting for permission or perfect conditions. Okay? If you are the sort of person with high agency, you believe that hard problems are solvable through persistence and effort whether or not you know the answer now. You believe that given enough time and effort, you can find the answer, which is why you're willing to move forward. Okay? Instead of avoiding opportunities that other people see as challenges, you move forward with them and relentlessly execute. Okay? You create your own opportunities essentially instead of waiting for them to appear. Now, when I say uncertainty here, I mean, I said 70% above and here, this number is actually going to go down, you know, the faster that these technologies get at being able to do things. But if you are capable of making confident decisions with lower than 100% certainty, if you break out of the paradigm that you know society has taught us where you need to put your hand up before you speak or before you use the washroom, you need to ask for permission or something like that, um you will be a lot more successful in a future environment that rewards speed over perfection. Okay, if we're talking technically speaking, you know, I mean, I talk a lot about AI and automation, right, on this channel. That's kind of the main point. uh if we're talking technically speaking, this means creating architectures and systems that are flexible and that accommodate unexpected changes and improvements in new models. If we're talking, you know, in terms of business, instead of you building out the whole solution, you build out an extraordinarily minimum viable solution and then you just test it with actual market feedback. And essentially, your whole road map is just turning ambiguity into some sort of competitive advantage through decisive action. And if other people are afraid to operate in your space because they don't really know if it's going to work and if you're the sort of person that can just say, "Oh, well that's good evidence that I should probably try that space. " You're the sort of person that's going to succeed over the course of the next 5, 10, maybe 15 years. All right. Another big thing that I think is

pretty obvious is that interpersonal coordination, empathy, um I'll also say leadership. These skills are going to gain a premium because artificial intelligence and models are soon going to dictate a lot of customer interactions and a lot of business management. So people just like when you know we started automating the manufacturing of bowls and fine china and stuff like that. Just like people still value arteasonal handrduced goods because they were made by a person people are going to value and prefer interpersonal coordination with human beings. Okay, as opposed to robots. And so if you are the sort of person that is compelling to be around, if you're empathetic, if you're capable of demonstrating an understanding of what a person is going through and then authentically, you know, helping them do that, maybe with some leadership skills, some empathy skills, whatnot, your ability to sell and persist in this economy um is going to be a lot better than if you relied on, let's say, technical skills. Because again, the value of knowledge is decreasing over time. That is basically what all of this is saying. The knowledge economy is not really going to be for us, right? And it's for models that are just going to learn smarter than us. So as a result, big things that are going to gain a premium are human to human selling. So you know, your ability to sell is something that is going to increase in value over time. Okay? Your ability to read between the lines, not necessarily just what you see in a text prompt, right? Your ability to take advantage of things like, I don't know, facial expressions, body language, stuff like that. All of this stuff is going to gain a premium. Okay? It's your ability to build trust through authenticity. It's actually your ability not to be perfect. It's your ability to have flaws, but then own those flaws. Okay, active listening, emotional intelligence. These are things that AI will, I'm sure, eventually solve, but probably not in the next uh next few years. And these are things that can give you a competitive advantage. Ultimately, a big thing that people are going to like is your ability to convert complex technical solutions into um at least what people think of as being human- ccentric business value. So if you are selling a system and 99. 999% of that whole company is AI automated at this point. There are models that deal with customers. They generate ads for you. They reach out to people on your behalf and so on and so forth. Finding a way to weave in some human touch is the way that you persist in an environment where everybody else is fully automating everything. Okay. So finding a way to weave in actual people. Another big skill is obviously learning how to

learn. What did I mention before? I mentioned again and I'm going to keep on saying this because I really want to drive this point. the value of knowledge is decreasing and the complexity of things in general is going up. Okay. Now because of that what is important is not necessarily your knowledge. Okay. It is instead your ability to learn new things with the value of knowledge decreasing the complexity of systems going up and then the ability of models to do things for us like I don't know code whole SAS apps overnight. The crystallized knowledge is not as important as your ability to quickly get up to speed and maybe get 70 to 80% certainty on anything. So the ability to learn, okay, this is the thing that is gaining a premium along with everything else that I've mentioned so far. If you can structure your life in such a way where you have periods of uninterrupted focus, where you could sit down and actually dedicate a certain amount of time to learning a topic, and if you could do this employing the best learning methods and whatnot, if you can get up to speed with new changing, rapidly dynamic business landscape, you will win. It's not about what you know. crystallized fields like medicine or a super complex engineering and whatnot. These are a lot less valuable than just your ability to get okay enough to build things with new and rapidly developed fields. I mean obviously we have AI available to us now. The people that are doing exactly what I'm talking about here, they are using AI to augment their learning. They are talking to chat GPT. They are communicating with Claude and obviously backfilling references where necessary. AI is extraordinarily powerful at creating personalized learning paths that adapt to your specific goals. Um, I think I probably learn a time and a half to two to maybe three times faster when I use these models in order to learn a concept than when I tried to do it in the old way. And if you can combine basically these two skills, focus with the ability to um use AI to learn, you know, your ability to prompt and whatnot, which I'll cover in a second. This is really the main quality that will make you successful when you have business spaces that are literally appearing and then whole industries disappear in the span of weeks. That's the sort of environment that we're all wandering into. Okay. So, you know, have AI help you break complex skills into manageable components. Have a AI feedback loops where you have quizzes at the end of every learning module. Basically, treat AI as like a 16th century tutor for the nobility. Okay, this is your chance to get that level of competitive advantage that other people lack. Okay, so that's big skill number three. Big skill

number four is obviously while we're developing these tools and these tools are more complicated than the most complicated nuclear bomb was just a few years ago. Your ability to use these tools is what's going to set you apart from other people. It's not necessarily your crystallized knowledge. It's your ability to use these tools to synthesize and and take all that knowledge and do something with it. Okay? So, people that know how to use AI are going to win. People that know how to chain multiple AI tools together with maybe a drag and drop no code builder like I talk about make. com and these sorts of tools, they're going to win because they're going to be able to build things out a lot faster. People that are able to extract maximum value while minimizing the cost and controlling the output quality of a big model pipeline, these people are going to win. And then people that you know have the ability to develop new prompting approaches are essentially going to build competitive edges in doing so. Like if you can build a really cool prompt pipeline if you know enough about prompting and AI that you can legitimately just put together a prompt. You could build a business in an afternoon. There are entire businesses that are basically nothing more than prompt rappers around, you know, very sophisticated models like chatbt and whatnot nowadays. So learn AI, use AI every single day. It's the people that are AI native and AI fluent that combine that with some old school techniques like focus, consistency, high agency, and execution. These are the people that are going to essentially be crowned in the future. Some quick and easy ways to do everything that I've talked about is another skill called systems thinking.

Now, systems thinking is basically your ability to run through like a list of mental models every time you're faced with a problem. Again, the value of knowledge is decreasing. And so, it's not necessarily do you know everything. Do you know all of the ins and outs of a particular problem? Do you understand that one problem really well? It's not about having crystallized knowledge that lets you solve that one thing. It's about having generalized knowledge that allows you to solve more or less 80% of every problem very quickly. And the best way you do this is with systems. Now, there are a bunch of very simple examples of systems thinking. Um, one, for instance, is called first principles thinking. This is just a heruristic or a strategy where you will grab a problem and you will just try and break it down by first principles. You'll ask yourself, hey, if I knew nothing about this problem, if all I had was my mind, but you removed all of like the specific information about the industry and the field and how to do business and everything that I've learned my entire life. Basically, if I was just like a fresh mind and I was tackled with this, where would I actually start? First principles thinking is at the core of why so many major businesses exist today because the entire strategic advantage of those businesses like SpaceX for instance was you know instead of looking at things through a conventional lens you know uh certain rocket components cost this much uh you know the current going rate for all of the stuff is that much you know first principles thinking breaks it down well what are the materials that go into a rocket h if I were to try and manufacture x y and z myself and maybe change the design what's the cheapest and most efficient way I could probably solve this if I knew nothing about the industry I guess the point I'm making is it's not top down, which is what a lot of people do, okay? Instead, it's bottom up. You start with the facts. You start with basically no assumptions and you try and arrive at some sort of solution. So, first principles thinking is an example of a model. Another sort of system is ecosystem based thinking. So, thinking of everything as an ecosystem or as an environment, right? Like the economy is actually an ecosystem. It's uh an ecosystem that is sensitive to some changes but very resilient to certain other changes. Okay? These are all different types of mental models. If you guys want a really good source for this stuff, check out um Farnum Street that now has a series of books called The Great Mental Models where they basically run you through a giant list of different ways to become better decision makers. Okay, I'm not going to pitch them. I'm not affiliated with them at all, but these guys have helped me a lot in my own thinking. And I basically run every problem through a variety of different systems established by these people and also some of the greater thinkers um throughout history. Okay.

All right. And the last big thing that I think is going to be probably the most important skill moving forward is your ability to be authentic and in doing so build an audience. So this is sort of meta because it's what I'm doing right now. Um and it's one of the key reasons why I am doing what I'm doing because I see a ton of potential moving forward. Now if you think about it over the course of the last few years, what have we seen? We've seen AI models get to the point where they are capable of generating images like this, cartoon strips, highquality, you know, things of human faces. We're seeing models now come up with the ability to joke and to elicit emotional reactions from people and write pros and whatnot. Basically, what we're seeing is AI models are soon going to be able to make really highquality content. And it's already happening right now as we speak, but it's going to continue happening more and more over the course of the next few years. What does this mean? Right now, the ratio of human generated content to AI generated content on most platforms is something like, you know, 99% to maybe 1%. This is going to flip at some point in the next few years and we're going to be faced with basically a synthetic content boom where 99. 999% of all of the content that most people see is going to be AI generated. Okay? And then 0. 00001% of the content is going to be human generated. Now because of that massive divide there's going to be massive supply of AI generated content. Human generated content is going to gain a premium but the value of the knowledge of the human generated content is not going to matter as much as just the ability of an audience to build a connection with a person. Okay? And that's where authenticity comes in and that's where these interpersonal skills that I was talking about come in cuz knowledge is not going to matter. My ability to explain something to you is not going to matter. As crappy as it is for me to say, it's a skill I spend a lot of time building. But at the end of the day, it is not anywhere near as uh as powerful as an AI model will be in the next couple years that's tuned to your specific preferences, reading level, knows exactly where you're at, and so on and so forth. So, where does the value of connection come in? It comes in your authenticity. ability to relate to people. And it comes in, to be honest, in your ability to just be yourself, a flawed human being. As we lose our economic value, the other values of humanity start to crop up. And so that's things like authenticity, connection, empathy, and coordination. So what does that mean for people that might be watching this? Well, my recommendation is if you guys wanted to build an audience. There is basically no better time than today. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. If you're going to do this, create valuable content that demonstrates your unique expertise. That's important for sure. But what's more important is do this authentically. Okay? How do you do this authentically? Well, one of the quickest and easiest ways to do so is when you're building an audience, build two-way relationships rather than broadcasting one directionally like a lot of people have been doing up until now. So, for instance, this is what I'm doing with my daily updates channel. This is a simple channel where I publish every day. And I basically just answer questions directly from my community, my YouTube subscribers, and so on and so forth. I do this because I'm developing two-way communication, not one-way communication. And two-way communication is what builds perceived authenticity. It's what builds credibility. And I show people basically who I am. If you look at all of the major channels right now, okay, I'm not the one that invented this. I wish I was, but I'm not. If you look at all of the major channels right now, all the people that are blowing up on socials and stuff like that, a lot of them have approaches just like this. They are doing some sort of authentic audience building. They are doing the old Gary Vee approach where they respond to their ex comments and replies for literally three or four years. You know, they're doing the Alex Formoszi approach right now where every single day he just does one question and answer on school. Essentially, the point I'm making at is they're making themselves a fixture in people's lives in the same way that you would with a relationship that you have in front of you, okay? Where you talk with them often, you build two-way relationships, you show them that you're a human. Again, as the um economic the knowledge value of humanity goes down, okay, other values are going to come up and the biggest value that I see in the near term is authenticity. Apparently, my spelling value has also gone down quite a bit. Okay, so share your successes. Also, share your failures. People don't like that perfectly uh pruned thing anymore because AI is going to be able to generate tons of that. Focus on long- form content. Okay? Long form content allows people a better barometer by which to see how much you align your words, actions, and values over time. Okay? It's one thing if people see you for 5 seconds on an Instagram reel. It's another thing if people see you for several hours watching a video like this, for instance. Focus on relationships that are going to survive technological disruption. Okay? And then, you know, create unique perspectives that AI can't replicate or mimic realistically well. And on top of perspectives, also create like content formats. Like what's one of the reasons why I'm doing these whiteboard videos that I've been doing recently? Well, one, I think it's an interesting and fun way to share knowledge. Two, it's like low production value, which allows me to poop out a lot of these to be honest without much additional work. But three, it's not something that a is really going to be able to replicate for quite a while. There's a lot of like minor nuance here in the way that I draw things and move the screen around and I show you guys, you know, various concepts and so on and so forth. So, in

a nutshell, these are six skills that won't be replaced by AI in 2030. They are what I am focusing on and what a lot of other people are focusing on. I hope you guys appreciated this shorter sort of video. And if you guys have any questions about what the future might look like for you, me, or anybody else watching, just drop a comment down below. Thanks so much. See you all in the next video. by