What skills will be valuable in the coming decades?

Traits that will be more or less important in the future

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One way to figure out what you should do with your life is to think about the future and ask: “How will the world look different in 20 years? What skills or traits will be more or less important?” You can use your answers to shape how you spend your time in the near-term. I would be curious your answers (email us: hi@nextplay.so). Here are some thoughts on this prompt (note that this is a guest post from the blog Quarter Mile).

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Sometimes it’s fun to think of the world as a big role playing game, like Skyrim. If you had been creating your character two thousand years ago—roughly around the time Jesus died—then you probably would have wanted to spend your time acquiring some of the following traits:

• Good with your hands

• Lots of physical endurance

• Naturally athletic

• Any level of fluency in other languages

• Being able to read and write

• Be a man born into the right social and economic class

• Talent at agriculture, fishing, and similar activites

There wasn’t exactly a booming economy for the kind of skillset that might land you a data analyst role at Deloitte. Now there is. The world has changed.

And because the world is going to keep changing, we thought it’d be interesting to write a list of skills and traits that are viewed as valuable now—but may cease to become valuable in the near future. Then we’ll speculate about some of the things that may increase in value over the next few decades.

These sorts of changes are important because their downstream impact can be seismic. What is the future of work? What do social structures look like if we reprioritize what’s important? What do we teach our kids? How do people design their lives?

Feel free to bookmark this essay for, say, 2040 or 2050 so you can come back and check if we were right. And please do contact us if there are any you think we’re missing.

Author’s note: We are referring only to personal traits and skills here. There are plenty of examples outside of this, like that drugs to treat HIV/AIDS might become less valuable now that we may be able to consistently prevent HIV from occurring in the first place. Or like how mass social media platforms may become less useful if they can’t solve the dead internet bots problem. But those things aren’t in the scope of this essay. Maybe another day.

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What might become less valuable

• Traditional intelligence: Intelligence, like the kind on IQ tests, could also soon be a solved problem vis-a-vis AI.

• Manual dexterity: Robots might, for real this time, take over more ‘do it with your hands’ jobs. Note: an exception to this may be becoming a top ~1 percent craftsperson (see the section below).

• Having a lot of memorized knowledge: Knowing lots about niche subjects might become like being good at mental math. Cool, but not so useful if there are tools that can do it better than any human.

• Being a generalist: Today it might be valuable to be 6/10 at a bunch of things. But if AI tools can be 6/10 at those things too, it’ll become more valuable to be 10/10 at one or two things.

• Traditional education: The combination of 1. More people than ever going to college and 2. College becoming a less efficient way to learn valuable skills means that the traditional university path may continue to lose value. Though the community-building aspect may gain value.

• Being skinny: Obesity could soon be a mostly solved problem (e.g. Ozempic) across much of the world.

• Speaking other languages at a beginner to intermediate level: The constant improvement of real-time translation might further trivialize the usefulness of knowing how to read a sign when you are on vacation. Being a fluent or native-level speaker in other languages, on the other hand, should continue to be valuable.

• Easily automatable skills: A couple examples are accounting and data science—if much of the rote work can be automated and the insights can become readily available, how does the role change?

• Knowing how to drive: Jury’s still out on this one, but it seems pretty likely knowing how to drive will be less useful in fifty years than it is today.

• Being born in the ‘right’ place: More accessible, powerful, and cheap tech, VR, remote work, AI, etc. may all have an impact in further evening the playing field regardless of geography.

What might become more valuable

Here are a few things that, based on the current direction of our world, may become more valuable than they are today.

• Trustworthiness: Increasing amounts of AI slop and tech may make it even harder to trust people, companies, and brands in the future.

• Having a real audience: Piggybacking on trustworthiness, having a real and dedicated audience (or group of people) that appreciates you and likes what you do may become more helpful. This does not mean ‘be an influencer’, and in fact it’s possible that influencers, at least certain kinds, may become less popular over time. (If you’d like to build your own audience, check out Writing Club)

• Doing things in real life: Tech, AI, VR, etc. continue to make it increasingly easy to not do things in real life. To connect with anyone from your home. Which may mean that in-person interactions become even more special, unique, and valuable.

• Craftspeople: If AI, tech, and robots can do a decent job, it becomes more valuable to do a spectacular job. Like how the rise of fast fashion has led to a boom in vintage and artisan clothing.

• Specializing: The Burden of Knowledge will make it harder to become knowledgeable to a level at which you can actually break new ground for humanity. So being truly great at lots of things will be harder—and it might be a better use of time to narrow your focus.

• Being funny: May help with connection and having an audience.

• Emotional and mental health in the age of AI: Knowing how to stay sane and happy will be especially useful in a world in which 1. Automation may mean you don’t have much of a valuable skill and 2. We may be able to increase the standard of living to a point at which hard work is not necessary for many humans.

• Agency and resourcefulness: It’s possible that everyone will have more power at their fingertips, and that deep memorization, knowledge, and recall may lose importance. So being great at using the resources at your fingertips—as opposed to just knowing things—may gain more value.

• Top ~10 percent creativity: Generative AI can do creative work better than the bottom 50, 60 (or more) percent of most fields. Which may mean that being a uniquely creative human may gain more value than it already has.

• Having good taste: We don’t have the perfect definition here. But it seems likely that in a world where there are more things than ever, and those things are more available to everyone, having an eye for what’s actually good will become more useful.

• Being adaptable: This has always been valuable, but it’s also true that the status quo of our world is changing much faster than it did thousands of years ago. Adaptability becomes more important than it has ever been.

• Kindness: Related to having a real audience and trustworthiness.

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