All this is different now with Artificial Intelligence. A.I. is the first technology that truly exceeds what humans can do, not merely in physical or computational terms, but in sheer intellectual terms — like pattern recognition, computer vision, speech recognition, automated learning and adaption.

Working alongside these brilliant machines, capable of performing most human intellectual tasks far better than we can, will humble us like no other invention since the Industrial Revolution.

The day is rapidly approaching when computers won’t require as many programmers as A.I. needs only the basic rules of a problem-set or domain to perform at a human level; the rest is done by the machine itself in terms of figuring out the solution through machine learning, automatically, on its own. (Last month, Google’s DeepMind AlphaGo beat the world’s grand master at Go not by containing a massive set of instructions to calculate each of the billions of possible moves, rather by learning to master the game over time using a simple set of rules and altering those rules based on trial-and-error learning. The machine got better and better at the game over time, just like we humans do!)

While I certainly agree that the future of work offers huge opportunities to rethink ways to “(put) people to work delighting each other with currently unimaginable products or levels of service”, we ought also to be thinking about why roles like Customer Service aren’t usually valued within an organization today; in fact customer service typically is among the bottom tier of jobs at Amazon (and most other tech companies), often paying minimum wage. This needs to change, IMHO.

This all points to the rise of innate humans skills for the future of work that need to be radically re-thought in terms of the value we derive from them — skills like empathy, compassion, collaboration, creativity, care-giving, deep listening, mindfulness, face-to-face communication, story-telling, lifelong learning and embracing diversity for unique problem-solving.