"It is an appropriate time to consider the term 'unskilled,'" writes Betsey Stevenson, Ford School professor and economist in an opinion article for Bloomberg. She says this term is "demeaning and misleading."
These workers, she says, "Often people have incredible skills; they just aren’t skills currently in high demand." With a changing labor market, she says, "No matter how valuable your skills are in the market today, they may or may not be highly valued by the market over the course of your lifetime."
"A person’s worth is never determined by their potential market wage," writes Stevenson.
"With AI threatening to devalue entire categories of human work, we need to be more purposeful in recognizing a distinction: The market value of a set of skills is not the same as its human value." So she asks, with AI, "What is left for humans to do?"
Stevenson writes, "We must invest in our humanity. At its core, a job has always been about meeting the needs of others." America's labor markets are changing, she writes "The reality is that the U.S. has become a service economy." Because of that she says, "it’s necessary to rethink assumptions about what kinds of jobs matter and, more important, how different kinds of work are valued."
"As we enter an era in which the value of 'hard skills' may be diminishing due to automation, the value of 'soft skills' — such as empathy and communication — will rise," says Stevenson. She puts a hopeful spin on this by saying, "The future of work may lie not in competing with machines on tasks they do better, but in embracing the human touch that technology can’t replicate."
She concludes, "We must remember that our worth is not determined by a paycheck, an algorithm, or a label. It is defined by our shared humanity, our ability to contribute in meaningful ways, and our capacity to care for and connect with each other in a world that is constantly changing."
Read the full commentary here.
