Anthropic cofounder and president Daniela Amodei has pushed back on the idea that the future of work belongs only to people with technical skills. In an interview with ABC News that aired on February 7, she said the qualities usually associated with the humanities will become more valuable, not less, as artificial intelligence spreads through the workplace.
According to Fortune’s account of the interview, Amodei said the number of jobs that AI could perform without any help from people is “vanishingly small.” Even the most cognitively demanding tasks that humans excel at can be augmented by AI, she said, but the value is created where people and machines work together.
What Anthropic looks for when hiring
Amodei said that when Anthropic hires today, it looks for strong communicators with high emotional intelligence and people skills, and for candidates who are kind, compassionate and curious and who want to help others. In her view, those traits are what make meaningful collaboration between humans and AI systems possible.
She also said that studying the humanities is “going to be more important than ever.” Current models are very good at science, technology, engineering and math, she said, but understanding ourselves, understanding history and understanding what motivates people will remain important, along with critical thinking and the ability to work with other people.
Amodei’s own background fits that argument. She majored in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, worked briefly as a congressional staffer, and then moved into technology at Stripe and later OpenAI before cofounding Anthropic in 2020 with her brother, chief executive Dario Amodei.
Other executives make a similar case
The view is not confined to Anthropic. JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon has said that so-called soft skills will carry growing weight, urging young people in December to focus on critical thinking, writing well and performing well in meetings. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said in November, on the MD Meets podcast hosted by Axel Springer’s Mathias Döpfner, that emotional intelligence and empathy are becoming more important as AI takes over analytical and technical tasks, adding that IQ has a place but is not the only thing the world needs.
The comments come at a time of rising concern about AI’s effect on employment. Dario Amodei has warned publicly about a potential decline in entry-level white-collar jobs, and Fortune noted that the release of Anthropic’s latest coding tools in early February coincided with a sharp selloff in technology stocks as investors weighed how much the demand for hand-written code might fall.
Daniela Amodei’s position is that the shift need not be purely negative. She said she continues to believe that humans and AI together create more meaningful, more challenging and higher-productivity work, and that the technology could widen access and opportunity for many people if they are prepared for it. People still enjoy dealing with other people, she said, and capable AI systems can complement rather than replace that interaction.
