AI to boost demand for soft skills but threatens many Stem careers

Christopher Pissarides, professor of economics at the London School of Economics, said workers in certain IT jobs risk sowing their “own seeds of self-destruction” by advancing AI that will eventually take the same jobs in the future.

While Prof Pissarides is an optimist on AI’s overall impact on the jobs ­market, he raised concerns for those taking Stem subjects hoping to ride the coat-tails of the technological advances. He said that despite rapid growth in the demand for Stem skills, jobs requiring more ­traditional face-to-face skills, such as in hospitality and healthcare, will still dominate the jobs market.

“The skills that are needed now to collect the data, collate it, develop it, and use it to develop the next phase of AI or more to the point, make AI more applicable for jobs will make the skills that are needed now obsolete because it will be doing the job,” he said in an interview.

“Despite the fact that you see growth, they’re still not as numerous as might be required to have jobs for all those graduates coming out with Stem because that’s what they want to do. This demand for these new IT skills, they contain their own seeds of self-destruction.”

The popularity of Stem subjects has boomed in recent years as students hope to make themselves more employable.

The rapid rise of AI could ­transform the skills needed for workers as it makes some tasks and roles obsolete.

However, in the long term, managerial, creative and empathetic skills, including communications, customer services and healthcare, will likely remain high in demand as they are less replaceable by technology, particularly AI.

“When you say the majority of jobs will be jobs that will involve personal care, communication, good social relationships, people might say, ‘Oh, God, is that what we have to look forward to in the future?’,” Prof Pissarides said.

“We shouldn’t be looking down at these jobs. They’re better than the jobs that school leavers used to do.”

Cyprus-born Prof Pissarides, along with Peter Diamond and Dale Mortensen, received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2010 for their work on labour market economics, specifically so-called frictions that result in mismatches between job vacancies and unemployment ways, including examining how wages and hiring are affected by regulation and policy.