Leisure Is Our Killer App

When recommending specific areas for development, management and technology experts tend to focus on two broad classes of skills that distinguish people from machines — what I’ll refer to as sociability and variability. In research I conducted with Harvard Business School marketing professor Michael Norton, we found that people are particularly averse to robots taking jobs that require social and emotional skills (think social worker), but they are more comfortable with robots taking jobs that require analytical skills (think data analyst). Jobs that require a great deal of variability — those for which people must continually shift between roles or tasks, develop new skills, or keep many things cooking at once — can be similarly draining, with negative consequences for job performance and turnover.

Source: sloanreview.mit.edu