As AI grows more capable, “human skills” have become shorthand for what still makes us uniquely valuable.

Human intelligence is embodied and emotional: We have desires, attachments, values, and skin in the game.

Story Intelligence is the capacity to recognise, question, and reshape the narratives that organise our lives.

AI can generate stories, but we must decide which stories to live by—and live with their consequences.

Everyone is now talking about “human skills.” The term has been around for a while, having gradually replaced the belittling “soft skills” to capture social and emotional intelligence, as well as "people skills" such as the capacity to relate, communicate effectively, collaborate, and motivate others.

But more recently, “human skills” has acquired a new urgency. We increasingly use it as a catch-all term to describe our comparative advantage in an AI-saturated world. The viral takeover of this phrase is worth analysing.

We are the first generation to work in a no longer exclusively human workforce. AI is not simply another technical tool, like the calculator, the computer, or the internet. Increasingly, many of us are working alongside AI agents as invisible colleagues, and may even find ourselves competing with them in the job market and losing out. Organisations no longer have to design solely for human-human interactions, but also for human-agent, agent-agent, and agent-human ones.

And because AI can take over entire workstreams, processes, and tasks that used to take us hours, weeks, or months, it requires us to rethink how work itself is organised.

More existentially, it forces us to ask anew what we can do that AI can't. Where and how do we still bring value? What kinds of problems are uniquely ours to solve?

What Kind of Animals Are We?

First, there is something deeply strange about the very idea of defining an entire species by its unique skill-set.........

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