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How humans can stay ahead of robots

My mother was recently the victim of a “sympathy scam”.

My mother was recently the victim of a “sympathy scam”.

Two teenage boys were going door to door selling half-melted boxes of overpriced ice cream, purportedly for charity, and she fell for it.

There were no badges, no licences and, of course, no receipts.

By the time I found out what transpired, those scoundrels were nowhere to be found.

We were certainly not the first people to be taken in by these scammers, nor will we be the last. The reason these scams work is because of our innate capacity for both deception and compassion.

And while we tell ourselves to learn from our mistakes and harden our hearts in the future, we will inevitably lapse again for we are, by our very nature, a gullible and emotional species.

But it occurred to me that evening, that in a world of increasingly perfect price transparency and increasing nervousness over technological disruption, the case of my mother paying S$30 for a S$3 pack of ice cream in fact makes a point about gaps in the future economy and what we can do to survive. For a small nation like ours, lacking natural resources, we have long acknowledged that we can never hope to compete in the production of commoditised goods.

Hence our focus on the services sector, which today makes up over 70 per cent of GDP and total employment.

But now, even services are being rapidly commoditised by the rise of technology.

The challenge that lays before us, therefore, is how we can adapt our current workforce and more importantly, our education system, for a whole new world run by computers, one where self-driving cars and sentient supercomputers threaten to make a vast number of us economically obsolete.

While the premium paid in the case of mum’s overpriced ice cream was due to fraud — and I am in no way advocating we should become a nation of conmen — the truth is that those teenage boys wove my mum a brilliant story, which “added value” to an otherwise commoditised product and successfully “closed” her on the sale.

This is something which no robot or software program can hope to do, not now, not ever; because the art of the sale is an inherently creative and necessarily human endeavour.

In retrospect, the scammers employed classic sales techniques beautifully.

Firstly, they recognised my mum’s compassionate character and adapted their pitch to get her “buy-in”. Secondly, they painted their customer a scenario which “made her a hero”. Thirdly, they listened patiently as she voiced her doubts and addressed them to eliminate “objection to purchase”. And lastly, they created a “sense of urgency” to force a decision and seal the deal.

So while the rise of the machines is understandably scary, we have reason to remain optimistic. As human beings, we can evoke emotion, which is an invaluable advantage indeed. Believe me, I would not have a box of overpriced ice cream sitting in my freezer today if we had been visited by a self-driving vending machine loaded with a pre-recorded message.

To make a crude generalisation, computers are excellent at tasks that require process, logic and even learning; traits which, when applied to humans, we typically term as being 
high-IQ.

But it is the subtleties, intricacies and imperfections of everything from the spoken word to body language (the things that require us to activate our EQ) that make us human, and it is our EQ that can make a S$3 product worth S$30 to someone.

In an age where computers are proving far more adept at IQ-type work than we are — ranging from simple mathematical calculations to strategy games like weiqi — we should perhaps turn our attention towards the EQ-type work that we have a comparative advantage in.

So in my opinion, the skills that we should be emphasising in schools and developing in the workplace are the “soft skills” we need to become a nation of communicators, translators and negotiators.

OUR ENDURING EDGE

We should recognise that although technology eliminates the need for many goods and services, technology itself is a product which needs to be sold to human end-users, ultimately.

Even in an age of perfect machine translation and information transparency, linguistic accuracy and unbridled openness will not resolve conflicts and close deals. In the real world, what is left unspoken is sometimes more important than what is spoken, and the ability to read nuances and react appropriately across different cultural settings may make or break a transaction.

For a start, I would love to see schools introduce more languages to our children at an early age, so that they grow up to become multicultural, multilingual global ambassadors.

It is a missed opportunity that we do not make things such as debate and public speaking a part of the basic curriculum because confident communication is learnt not in an exam hall but out on the stage.

Ours is a world which rewards those who speak up and speak well, and who know what to say and when to say it. We should teach our kids to be street-smart, and we need to train them to read people as well as they read books.

We should also help them develop skills in negotiation and critical thinking early on because these are essential traits that will differentiate them in the job market of the future.

Promoting volunteerism and community work, encouraging physical interactions over virtual ones (such as having street football rather than online games), and introducing a “lite” version of the General Paper in secondary school are among the suggestions I would propose.

In the economy of the future, my money is on the storytellers and salespeople, not the pencil pushers and bureaucrats. Because whether you are a CEO hustling to justify your company’s S$1 billion valuation or the auntie offering tissue for S$1 at the hawker centre, the world will always need you to fill an emotional void the computers cannot.

As for the rest of us, with the scorching sun of technological disruption beating down, we can either sit down and curse at the gods, or get out there and sell some ice cream. I suggest we do the latter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Charles Tan Meah Yang is a co-founder of Global Alternatives, an independent owner-operator of cross-border marketplace platforms www.PropertyCrowd.com and www.Prop-X.com

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