For years, the dominant question about artificial intelligence and employment has been: Which jobs will AI replace? For a student deciding what to learn, a young professional planning a career, or an experienced employee trying to remain relevant, there is a more useful question: Which skills are becoming more valuable because AI exists? The distinction matters. Artificial intelligence can already draft emails, summarise reports, generate computer code, analyse documents, create presentations, translate languages and produce images. Consequently, being able to produce a routine first draft, retrieve basic information or execute a standard cognitive task may no longer differentiate one worker from another as strongly as it once did. But that does not mean human skills are becoming irrelevant. Evidence emerging from labour markets suggests almost the opposite. AI is changing where human value lies. As machines become better at producing answers, value increasingly shifts towards people who can formulate the right problem, judge whether an answer is reliable, combine it with domain knowledge, make decisions under uncertainty, communicate those decisions and take responsibility for the outcome. This International Literacy Day, therefore, there is reason to reconsider what being “skilled” means in an AI-enabled economy. AI is Changing Tasks Faster Than It is Eliminating Entire Jobs The starting point is to distinguish a job from the tasks within a job. An accountant does not merely calculate numbers. A manager does not merely prepare presentations. A lawyer does not merely draft documents. A researcher does not merely find information. Each occupation consists […]