The Four Skills Robots Will Never Have (And Why They're Your Only Competitive Edge)

Everyone's freaking out about AI. Robots. Automation. The future where machines do most of the work and humans sit around feeling obsolete.

I get it. You pick up your phone and there's a new headline every day about some AI doing something that humans used to do. It's unsettling. It feels like the ground is shifting and nobody knows what to hold onto anymore.

I recently talked with Tom Chi, who spent years at Google X building hardware, leading teams on projects that felt impossible, and then building a venture firm focused on what he calls "radical harmony"—rebuilding industries so they don't destroy the planet. And he's also built something called the Future Skills Toolbox, which is exactly what you think it is: a course about what skills will actually matter as machines get better at the things machines are good at.

Here's what Tom said that changed how I think about this whole fear about automation: "Every experiment can be small and it's more effective for an experiment to be small. But if your larger ambition is small, then that very rarely becomes something big."

The insight isn't really about skills. It's about ambition.

The 95% Problem

Tom shared something that I think is the most important thing anyone's said about how we actually innovate in organizations. He said that about 95% of ideas that people come up with in business contexts don't work exactly the way they're being proposed.

Think about that. You're in a meeting and someone pitches an idea. Everyone gets excited. They build a whole presentation around it. They evangelize it around the company. And the truth is, what they're proposing has about a 5% chance of being exactly right.

But here's what most organizations do: They spend weeks—sometimes months—arguing about this 95% wrong thing. Discussing it. Debating it. Building consensus around it.

And by the time they're done talking, people are so committed to the idea that when it doesn't work, they blame the execution instead of the concept.

Tom's approach is different. He says: "Why don't we just skip all those steps? As soon as you have an idea, let's make it. And when we make it, we're going to see whether it does anything useful or not."

This only works if you can make things fast. If it's going to take you six months to build something, then yes, by all means, spend two months debating the approach. But if it's going to take you three hours? Spending two months discussing it before you build is insane.

The companies that win at innovation aren't smarter than everyone else. They're faster at making things. And that speed is what kills the 95% problem—because the market does the evaluating for you, not your board.

Why Corporations Don't Actually Want What They Say They Want

Tom talked about this fascinating thing that happened when Amazon acquired Whole Foods. Everyone freaked out. Not because Amazon was buying a grocery company—that didn't really make sense to most people. But because Amazon has a reputation for radical experimentation.

They try a lot of things. They fail publicly. They learn and iterate. And that speed of learning is what makes them formidable.

Compare that to Walmart. If Walmart bought Whole Foods, would anyone care? Probably not. Walmart is also a big company, but they don't have a reputation for constant experimentation. They have a reputation for managing supply chains well and cutting costs.

And Tom's point is that most corporations say they want to be like Amazon. They want to move fast. They want to experiment. They want to innovate.

But the minute you actually start experimenting, actually failing, actually doing things quickly without perfect information, people get nervous. The system pushes back. The procedures kick in. The approval process slows things down.

Because most corporations don't actually want to be fast. They want to look like they're fast while maintaining the safety of their existing processes.

And those two things are incompatible.

The Four C's (And Why They'll Still Be Valuable When Everything Else Is Automated)

Okay, so Tom's built a toolbox around the skills that will actually matter as machines get better. And he identified four things: Creativity, Compassion, Community, and Critical Thinking.

These are the skills that robots fundamentally struggle with. Not because they're hard to automate—eventually, machines might get better at all of these. But because they're about human values and human judgment and things that require actually caring about the outcome.

You can automate a process. You can't automate the decision about whether that process is serving what actually matters. You can automate a production line. You can't automate the decision to shut it down because the environmental cost is too high.

And here's the thing that nobody wants to hear: Most of our education system doesn't teach these skills. We teach compliance. We teach the ability to follow instructions and pass tests. We teach reading and math, which are tools. But we don't teach creative problem-solving as if it's a core life skill. We don't teach compassion as if it's something that can be developed and strengthened.

We certainly don't teach people how to think critically about the institutions that are evaluating them.

So Tom's argument is that if you actually want to be valuable in a world with advanced AI and automation, you need to go back to school. Not to a university. To yourself. And you need to study these four things the way previous generations studied reading and math.

The Ambition Question

But here's where Tom's insight about ambition comes back in. He said something that I think most people miss: "Every experiment can be small and it's more effective for an experiment to be small. But if your larger ambition is small, then that very, very rarely becomes something big."

You can fail your way to success at something small. You can run a thousand experiments and eventually get a winning combination.

But if your ambition is to run a healthy donut shop, you're going to run a healthy donut shop. Your experiments are going to be about donut recipes and marketing approaches for your neighborhood. That's a legitimate goal. There's nothing wrong with it. But it's not going to become something big because the fundamental ambition was small.

Whereas if your ambition is to figure out how to feed seven billion people without destroying the planet, or how to make air conditioning work without destroying the atmosphere, then you're going to conduct experiments that are radically different. Your failures are going to teach you more because the stakes are higher.

And most people are conducting small experiments against big ambitions, or big experiments against small ambitions.

The combination that matters is small experiments guided by big ambition.

Why This Matters

You're probably not going to join Google X or launch a venture fund to solve climate change. But the skills Tom's identifying—the ones that will actually matter—those are skills you can develop. Right now. Today.

Creativity doesn't require permission. It requires practice. It requires doing work that scares you because you don't know if it'll work. It requires failing and learning and trying again.

Compassion requires showing up to people's actual lives. Understanding what they're dealing with. Caring about them as humans instead of as customer segments or problems to solve.

Community requires being willing to be vulnerable. To admit you don't have all the answers. To ask for help. To build something together that's bigger than what you could do alone.

And critical thinking—actual critical thinking, not the kind they teach in school—requires being willing to question everything, including the things that made you successful before.

The robots can have the rest. These four things are yours if you actually claim them.

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Want the Full Story?

Tom Chi talks about all of this in way more depth on The School of Innovation podcast. He breaks down prototype thinking, why most corporations fail at rapid experimentation despite saying they want it, and how to think about your career and skills in a world that's changing faster than you can predict.

Because here's what Tom's toolbox is really about: It's not about predicting the future. It's about building a set of skills that will still be valuable no matter what the future looks like. And that's something nobody can automate for you.