The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines
From one of the world's 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 learning--school and books--gave 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. It's 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. He's found that just as the four amino acids are the building blocks of DNA, the three C's--challenge, complexity, and connection--are the basic components of how we develop our most valuable skills.
Whether you're 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 century--a guide to help you not only survive but thrive.
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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 Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Digital Fellow with Stanford's Digital Economy Lab and MIT's Institute for the Digital Economy. He received his PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
"If you're worried about your skills becoming obsolete, this book may be your saving grace. Matt Beane has spent his career studying how to gain and maintain expertise as technology evolves, and his analysis is both engrossing and edifying." -- ADAM GRANT, number one New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again, and host of the TED podcast WorkLife
"Beane shows us the true human-centered approach to AI advancements and how we must act now to achieve the next generation of human skills coupled with the productivity gains from AI." -- FEI-FEI LI, Sequoia Professor of Computer Science and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) at Stanford University
"Beane delivers an essential, meticulously researched road map for combining intelligent technologies with the way humans have built skill for thousands of years to reach our brightest possible future." -- REID HOFFMAN, cofounder of Inflection AI and LinkedIn, and partner at Greylock
"With riveting stories, The Skill Code offers a timeless recipe for skill development and thriving at work in the age of AI." -- AMY EDMONDSON, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School and author of Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well
"Matt's decades-long curiosity about human work positions him perfectly to offer such a thoughtful and well-researched guide to skill development in this age of generative AI." -- JEFF WILKE, former CEO of Amazon's Worldwide Consumer and chairman of Re: Build Manufacturing
"There has never been a more important time for this book--nor anyone more qualified to explain what it all means than Matt Beane. The Skill Code teaches urgent lessons." -- ETHAN MOLLICK, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
