3 Human Skills That Make You Irreplaceable in an AI World

You don’t have to doomscroll very long to find articles claiming that AI will disrupt work as we know it by reducing headcount across the economy and eliminating some professions altogether. As of 2024, AI hadn’t had a statistically significant impact on wages or hours worked — yet the vibe of the labor market is anxious. Everyone is constantly asking themselves, “Will AI replace me?” It’s exhausting, depressing, and counterproductive. 

But there’s a simpler, and more useful, question to ask:
“What would make me irreplaceable?”

Hint: It has nothing to do with prompt engineering.

It has to do with doubling down on the things humans do especially well — the skills that don’t scale, that require curation, curiosity, and connectivity.

We were already drowning in content — then AI made the marginal cost of creation zero. Now we’re in so deep, it’s hard to know what’s worth surfacing. Already, nearly 75% of new webpages in 2025 contain AI-generated content. 

Time and attention are becoming even scarcer. Taste — the ability to identify what is worth paying attention to and what isn’t — is becoming increasingly important. Stepfanie Tyler put it well in her Substack essay: 

In a world of infinite content, people will increasingly organize around curators — the ones they trust to filter the chaos and surface what matters.

This isn’t just a media problem. Curation is the difference between adding information and adding value, and it’s a crucial skill across industries. 

How do you put this into practice? Start by getting clear on who or what you’re curating for. Are you guiding a client through a major decision? Shaping your company’s strategy? Championing a new initiative? 

Whatever the context, curation is an act of brand building. To curate well, you need to understand the identity you’re supporting: What do they want to be known for? Stepfanie Tyler again:

Curation isn’t just scrolling and reposting. It’s a form of authorship — choosing the tone and the frame of the underlying message. If your brand is bold and irreverent, surface things that surprise or challenge the status quo. If your brand is analytical, specialize in spotting second-order insights: connecting economic data to consumer behavior or spotting patterns in quarterly earnings.

Prof G Media exists to inform — but also to entertain. That means we have to earn attention. As the research lead, I anchor my work in that dual mandate. I think of myself as a data curator, and I follow what I call the “wow” test: If a data point, sentence, or slide doesn’t challenge you, surprise you (or make you say “wow”), it doesn’t belong. There’s no shortage of information out there. In most cases, you just need to dig deeper or get more creative in how you present it. The key is knowing which insights reflect the Prof G Media voice, and curating them in a way that both captures and merits the audience’s attention.

The best curators build a library of content and sources over time — not just to find material to share but also to learn what great curation looks like. Start collecting quotes and stats that pique your interest, and seek out exceptional creators or role models in your field.  

Reading list:

To curate well, you need a big library to draw from. And to build that, you need curiosity — the willingness to explore outside your lane, to chase ideas that don’t have an immediate, or obvious, payoff.

Curiosity builds creative range, and that lets you connect dots, sometimes across wildly different genres, that others don’t even see. This is often where the biggest breakthroughs emerge:

Read across disciplines. Let yourself get interested in things that aren’t “relevant” or “productive.” Follow the weird stuff. 

This strategy has a powerful track record.

As Robert Greene (whose interview with Scott you can check out here) describes in Mastery, progress begins with anomalies — strange outliers or overlooked curiosities that spark deeper investigation.

Studying snails led scientists to discover a powerful non-opioid pain medication; studying Gila monster venom gave rise to GLP-1 drugs; and researchers studying bacteria in Yellowstone’s hot springs discovered an enzyme that made it easy to copy DNA, revolutionizing genetics, forensics, and biotechnology.

Julia Child worked for an intelligence agency (which later became the CIA) during WWII, filing thousands of sensitive documents. The role sharpened the organization and precision that defined Mastering the Art of French Cooking — and even led to her first “recipe”: shark repellent for the U.S. Navy.

Slack started as a team building an online video game, but it was their side project, a chat tool for internal communication, that became the breakthrough, reshaping how teams collaborate everywhere.

Nvidia might never have existed if Jensen Huang hadn’t been determined to build chips powerful enough to support better video game graphics. That research led to the GPU, the engine behind today’s AI boom, and has made Huang one of the richest men alive. 

I started taking Ancient Greek classes because I was genuinely curious about that period of history. Once I realized I had a knack for it, I decided to major in Classics. I loved it, but I also saw it as a differentiator. 

Classics challenged me to think across disciplines — to connect language, philosophy, and politics with broader questions about human nature and storytelling. A lot of it involved zooming in on specific moments in ancient history and finding connections to the present. One of my favorite papers was about how Lucretius’ ideas echoed in Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign. 

That’s basically what I do in my job now: take complex, often dry topics in finance and economics and translate them into stories that are interesting and relatable. If I hadn’t studied Classics — if I’d taken, say, Economics, I think I’d be worse at my job.

Another important strategy: Go outside. Real-world friction sparks original ideas. Albert Einstein spotted a tower from a streetcar and imagined relativity. Nikola Tesla walked through the park and dreamed up alternating current. 

In a recent interview, Derek Thompson, journalist and bestselling author, discussed the underrated but critical skill of paying attention to your surroundings — and closer attention to the little voice in your head that says “WTF is that?” Most people are used to ignoring those moments of confusion or curiosity. But writers, thinkers, and builders must notice the odd pattern, the tiny contradiction, the solution that doesn’t make sense. Those fragments are usually part of a bigger puzzle.

AI can sort, summarize, and calculate — but it can’t explore a new city, meet new people at bars, or try on new shoes. It couldn’t look at a soft drink, consider the trend toward healthier eating, and dream up probiotic soda, and it wouldn’t get frustrated cleaning and imagine how nice a bagless vacuum would be. Those loose, lateral, original connections are still uniquely ours, and uniquely valuable.

Reading list:

AI can summarize, analyze, and even write with fluency. What it can’t do is care. It doesn’t build trust, show emotional investment, or make someone say “I want that person in the room.”

That’s why, in an age optimized for competence, connection is the real premium.

Connectivity means showing up with warmth, curiosity, and follow-through. It’s being the person who brings the group together, who makes others feel smarter when they work with you, or more confident because you’re on the project. When others see that your heart’s in it, they trust you’ll go the extra mile, pay attention to the crucial details, and take personal responsibility. That trust is hard to earn and impossible to automate. 

This is why Scott regularly advocates for in-person work, especially for young employees. Distance from senior-level leadership is a tax on both advancement and compensation.

Your ability to build genuine relationships creates the foundation for the deepest, most valuable forms of professional trust. So, be the personality hire. Maintain strong relationships. Connection pays:

Being successful in business is increasingly about network density. Access moves through people.

On the Prof G Markets podcast, we’ve talked about how the job market for recent grads is terrible. They’re facing a hiring rate 44% lower than that of 2022. The “new grad gap” — that is, the difference in unemployment between recent grads and the overall economy — is the worst in recent history. It’s tempting to blame but there are other compelling explanations, namely that the economy has been frozen by uncertainty, making U.S. firms hesitant to hire brand-new talent. 

That said, even if AI isn’t the reason jobs are disappearing, it’s fundamentally reshaping how people look for them. For his article Young People Face a Hiring Crisis, Thompson asked college career offices what they felt was most concerning about the current economic moment. What he learned was that AI has made it easier for students to tweak cover letters and resumes such that they’re applying to more jobs, which overwhelms HR departments, which then “turn to AI-enabled recruitment technology to handle the onslaught, leaving both sides feeling overwhelmed, angry, and anxious.” 

When your resume is one in a sea of millions of AI-tweaked amalgams of credentials, the chances you break through on your own are, well, even lower than they were before. Now, more than ever, you need referrals. And for referrals, you need friends. If that sounds scary, just remember: Our networks aren’t static — the more people you meet, the more people you meet.

A high school connection helped spark Ed’s start at Prof G Media. His friend’s mother is Joanna Coles, currently chief content officer at the Daily Beast and formerly at Hearst. I met her at Scott’s book launch last year and asked her what Ed was like back then. She told me Ed impressed her from the moment they met. The kid stood up in his friend’s room, walked over to her, shook her hand, and said, “Nice to meet you; I’m Ed Elson.” When Joanna went to bat for him with Scott all those years later, it wasn’t just because he had scored a lucky connection. He had earned her help by being a compelling person and friend.

I wound up at Prof G Media because I knew someone, too. I’d worked with Caroline Schagrin, our former senior producer, on a student-run magazine at Syracuse. She hired me then as a sophomore fact-checker upon recommendation from a professor. Four years later, she was hiring an assistant producer here at our company. Caroline slid into my Instagram DMs and asked for a call. It didn’t take much more than that. We knew we wanted to work together again. 

Reading list:

Cool story. But is AI going to replace me, or what?

Transparently, I don’t know. Nobody does, if they’re being honest. Scott often says, “AI isn’t going to take your job; someone using AI will.” The operative word here isn’t AI but someone. This is about people, not technology. Curating meaning from chaos, following curiosity to insight, and building relationships are timeless skills that show up throughout the history of human invention and adaptation, from the wheel to the GPU. Whether you develop those skills and how you apply them to your career is up to you. So instead of doomscrolling yourself out of a job, consider another classic from Scott: “The best way to predict the future is to make it.” That’s what I’m doing. How about you?