There’s No Such Thing as “Robot Proofing”

Last year, Northeastern University’s College of Computer Science was given a gift of $50 million by entrepreneur Amin Khoury.

According to Slate, the money was earmarked for programs that would help students compete in a marketplace where artificial intelligence has increasingly taken jobs away from humans.

“As the global economy adapts to the influence of artificial intelligence… Northeastern is empowering humans to be agile learners, thinkers, and creators, beyond the capacity of any machine,” a university press release said.

“A robot-proof model of higher education is not concerned solely with topping up students’ minds with high-octane facts,” Joseph Aoun, Northeastern’s president wrote in his book Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “Rather, it refits their mental engines, calibrating them with a creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover, or otherwise produce something society deems valuable.”

If we want to beat robots, we have to become more human. Developing skills that are unique to our species will give us the edge over robots.

From piloting a plane to radiology, lots of jobs can be done by a robot. However, those robots aren’t going to have the interpersonal communication skills, empathy and creativity that might be required by someone administering physical therapy to a very sick patient.

Robot-proofing will be a hard idea to sell as manufacturers and businesses see great potential to save money by automating tasks and removing humans from the process.