The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines

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From one of the worlds top researchers on work and technology comes an insightful and surprising guide to protecting your skill in a world filling with AI and robots.

Think of your most valuable skill, the thing you can reliably do under pressure to deliver results. How did you learn it

Whatever your job plumber, attorney, teacher, surgeon decades of research show that you achieved mastery by working with someone who knew more than you did. Formal learningschool and booksgave you conceptual knowledge, but you developed your skill by working with an expert.

Today, this essential bond is under threat. In our grail-like quest to optimize productivity with intelligent technologies like AI and robots, we are separating junior workers from experts in workplaces around the world. Its a looming multi-trillion-dollar problem that few are addressing, until now.

In The Skill Code, researcher and technologist Matt Beane reveals the hidden code that underwrites every successful expert-novice relationship. Beane has spent the last decade examining this unique bond in a variety of settings, from warehouses to surgical suites. Hes found that just as the four amino acids are the building blocks of DNA, the three Cschallenge, complexity, and connectionare the basic components of how we develop our most valuable skills.

Whether youre an expert or a novice, this book will show you how to build skill more effectively and how to make intelligent technologies part of the solution, not the problem. The Skill Code is an insightful must-read, with significant implications for how we will work and build skill in the twenty-first centurya guide to help you not only survive but thrive.

Author Bio

Matt Beane does field research on work involving robots and AI to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we use across the broader world of work. He has published in top management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, and spoken on the Ted stage. He also took a two-year hiatus from his doctoral studies to help found and fund Humatics, an MIT-connected, full-stack IoT startup. Beane is an Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Digital Fellow with Stanfords Digital Economy Lab and MIT'sInstitute for the Digital Economy. He received his PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management.