Stop Competing With ChatGPT – The Skills of the Past Present and Future

Understanding the Skills We Celebrate

In order to understand the skills of what we need to develop, we need to understand the skills we used to celebrate, the skills that are becoming less and less relevant today, and then the skills of tomorrow. In order to do this, let’s go back to the agricultural era.

The Agricultural Era

In the agricultural era, there were three simple ways for us to add value to the world. And remember that these three simple ways were practiced for 10,000 years, for 500 generations.

We were doing almost the same thing over and over and over. And they’re very simple. You had to:

Number one, follow your forefathers.

Number two, understand the seasons.

And number three, make sure you had the strength to work the fields for up to 12 hours a day.

Quite simple. That’s all you had to do.

Show up, be obedient, follow your forefathers, work the fields. For 10,000 years, the most important skill or quotient you could bring to the world was your physicality, your muscles. You could come to the place and work it. In fact, if you weren’t strong, you’d quite literally starve to death because you weren’t adding value to the village in any way.

And so you realize for 10,000 years, Physical Quotient, or PQ, was by far the most important thing.

But when the Industrial Revolution started to arrive, this PQ started to fade out. The way we measured output in the agricultural era was horsepower. And us as human beings are a third of a horsepower.

A horse is a horse of a horsepower, meaning one horsepower. But then as the new Industrial Revolution started to arrive, we started to get a truck that had four horsepower.

Already 12 times stronger than any human, and then all of a sudden we have the Bugatti at 1600 horsepower, then we have a ship at 100,000 horsepower, and now we have rockets at 7 million horsepower.

We can’t compete horsepower to horsepower, we don’t even try anymore.

So let’s ask the question, who’s quicker than a scooter? Does anybody run faster than a bicycle, or pack quicker than a factory? No, it’s not even what we do anymore. We’re not physical anymore.

The Rise of the Industrial Era

Now we are intelligent beings. We’re not into our physicality. And we realize that everything in the physical world is now being outsourced to machinery. Now what we have to realize is that when the Industrial Revolution started to arrive, the way that we had to add value to the world had to dramatically change from the agricultural era.

And in the industrial era, we didn’t have to follow our forefathers, we had to follow a system.

And the system was our educational system, our organizational system. And the better you followed that system, the more you’d be prized. It wasn’t about your uniqueness, your genius, your fascination, your physicality.

It was about how well you could memorize, understand a system, and then follow that system.

You also had to get deeper and deeper into what you had studied. You couldn’t jump between careers. You couldn’t decide that you were going to be an accountant, and then 10 years in, you have to now become PR, and then HR, and then marketing.

Your CV would look terrible. Nobody would hire you. So at 16 or 18, you decided what you wanted to study. And for the rest of your life till you died, you actually just did that same career.

Why? Because you’d be hired on your experience. You’d be hired because of your network that you developed in that system.

And over the last 200 years, what we’ve celebrated is intelligence quotient or IQ.

The Age of IQ

In the age of IQ, everything that happens up here in our minds is by far the most important thing. We intellectualize everything. We have actually stopped feeling anything. And if we don’t go to gym, we don’t even work our physical bodies anymore.

Everything’s been focused on our intelligence. And we realize that this industrial era focused all of our energy on IQ.

But let’s see what’s happening with IQ right now, because right now an average human has IQ of between 90 and 120. That’s an average human.

ChatGPT 5.0 has already got an IQ of 148, which is already 20 or 30 points above the human that we have right now. Right now, Elon Musk has an IQ of 155. Whether you like him or not, it’s not the point. The point is he’s turning industry after industry after industry upside down, and is going to be the world’s first trillionaire.

So that’s an IQ of plus or minus 50 than the average human. Then you add eight more IQ points onto that, then you have Einstein, and Einstein talks to us about a new version of reality, moving from Newtonian science to quantum science, giving us the rules and science behind laser lights, GPS, and a whole range of things we’re still trying to get our heads around today.

We’re just talking about 55 more IQ points than the average human. We’re not talking about a lot of IQ points above the average human, and we’re already in super genius space.

But what we are realizing is that AI is doubling on intelligence every six months or so.

Meaning that by the end of the year, AI will be sitting at 280, then another six months over 400, then over 600, which means that over the next few years, we’ll start dealing with AIs that’ll have 10 times, if not 100 times more IQ points than us.

Meaning that we can’t compete IQ to IQ, just like we can’t compete physicality to physicality to a scooter, let alone a car, a truck, a ship, even the smallest mechanical idea we can’t compete against.

If you’re wondering what this means for your career, read Will AI Replace You or Redefine You.

The System Is Dissolving

Before I show you what the three new skills are, think about children and if you have children yourself, think about what they want to be. About 57% of GenZ want to be influencers.

When I ask this at the many talks I do parents are often embarrassed that their kids want to be influencers, but the thing is you your grandmother was embarrassed when you told her you wanted to do something. Because it’s the same thing, right? By shrugging this off as foolish and childish you become your grandmother, congratulations.

So what we realize is that when something happens that we don’t quite understand, we mock it.

Which is kind of what everybody does. You may think what is this idiot? And you tell your friends, “This little Muppet wants to go and do TikTok schmuck talk. I don’t know what you’re even talking about. What are you doing?

Go and pick up a textbook and get ready for 1986 like your mother did”. That’s what you’re wanting your kid to do. Because it’s just familiarity that you’re wanting.

But let’s understand something, that the skills of tomorrow are not fitting into a system.

They’re doing exactly the opposite. They’re actually about fitting out of the system.

Why? The system itself is dissolving right in front of our eyes right now.

Newly grads can’t get jobs. You’re starting to see many organizations start to downgrade. Agents are starting to get hired. People are starting to get let go.

Why? Because the system itself is becoming demonetized, democratized, and disrupted right in front of our eyes.

From University to Multiversity

We get our kids to go to something called university, meaning they’re going to study one thing, and by the time they finish, that one thing’s over. And now they’re stuck.

And so what we actually want to do is multi-versity, which is about engaging with as many different things as possible.

What that requires of us, not to let our kids follow a system, but to follow their God-given curiosity.

When you follow your God-given curiosity, you’re unique. Nobody else thinks like you, acts like you, storytells like you, adds value to the world like you.

Before it was about fitting into the system, and where the system is imploding, we have to fit out of the system, which means that your kids wanting to be influencers are only asking for one thing.

A unique voice.

They just want to share that unique voice. And we can see people making hundreds of millions of dollars around the world just sharing a unique voice about some idea, some process, some service, some product, which means that what we have to do is we have to develop a new skill.

The Rise of AQ, Adaptability Quotient

It’s not about intelligence anymore. It’s about a brand new skill that’s much more focused about constant change. And when you are focused on just one type of intelligence, which you’ve gone to uni-versity, one thing, and studied one thing over and over, that’s not being adaptable.

In fact, that is the exact opposite of being adaptable. That’s being stuck to one type of thinking, and then now focusing on that one type of thinking moving forward.

Now we realize that the big four consultancies have brought out papers and they reckon that if you are 10 years old today, you’ll have between 20 and 30 careers by the time you finish working.

Meaning that we went from one or two, maybe, careers to 15 times more careers, that they have to keep unlearning to relearn to unlearn to relearn.

And guess what? We’ll be competing against our kids over the next five to 10 years because they’ll be in the same marketplace as us. Because the marketplace that we’re in right now is going to radically change over the next five years.

And so we realized that the skill of the future is not what you know. What you know is irrelevant because it’s changing so quickly.

The skill of the future is how you behave.

And the how is very different to what. What is being focused and directed. How is being relaxed and experimental.

It’s a very different type of skill set.

And so the skill of the future is not PQ, it’s not IQ, it’s AQ, which is adaptability quotient.

And this adaptability quotient is exactly the opposite of what our brains have been taught to do. Exactly the opposite.

Our brains have not been asked to be adaptable in any way. And we realize that there’s been so much written about AQ.

And it’s very important for us to study and understand the skill sets of adaptability.

But there’s also a very, very big underpinning of what makes adaptability the key practice to have. And the big thing that makes adaptability work is high levels of emotional intelligence.

Note: This blog post is an adaptation of the transcript from the video below, which forms part of my video series on AI.