Humans are Underrated

Humans are Underrated Plot Summary

Introduction

As technology rapidly advances to perform increasingly complex tasks, a pivotal question emerges for our future: what roles will humans play in an economy where machines can do so much? The digital revolution has already transformed numerous industries, and artificial intelligence continues to master tasks once thought to be exclusively human domains. This technological progression creates an urgent need to understand which human capabilities will remain valuable and why. Rather than focusing on what computers cannot do—a historically unreliable approach—the exploration centers on what humans inherently value receiving from other humans, regardless of technology's capabilities. The answer reveals a profound shift: the skills most valuable in tomorrow's economy will be deeply human, social capabilities that involve empathy, collaboration, storytelling, and relationship-building. These capabilities stem from our evolutionary history as social beings and represent not merely what we know, but who we are. While technological skills have dominated economic value in recent decades, the evidence suggests we are witnessing a historic reversal, where success will increasingly depend on our most fundamental human traits—precisely the qualities that technological advancement makes more precious as they become scarcer in our digital-dominated lives.

Chapter 1: The Shifting Landscape: How Technology is Redefining High-Value Work

The economic value of human skills is experiencing a historic transformation. For centuries, technological progress has consistently changed the nature of work, requiring humans to develop new capabilities to remain relevant. The Industrial Revolution shifted value from artisanal craftsmanship to more mechanical, repetitive skills. The 20th century brought another shift as electrification and complexity demanded more educated workers. In recent decades, information technology created yet another transition, with medium-skilled jobs squeezed while high-skilled analytical work and low-skilled service jobs expanded. We are now witnessing a fourth major transition as technology advances into both ends of the skills spectrum. Artificial intelligence can increasingly handle complex analytical tasks once reserved for highly educated professionals. Legal discovery work once performed by lawyers can now be done more efficiently by software. Medical diagnosis, financial analysis, and even creative tasks like writing articles or composing music are falling within technology's capabilities. Similarly, physical tasks once thought beyond machines' reach—from delicate manual manipulation to driving vehicles—are now being mastered by robotics and autonomous systems. This progression follows a predictable pattern: technology first complements human work, making us more productive, but eventually substitutes for it entirely. A lawyer using search technology is more productive than one without it, but as the technology improves, it may eventually eliminate the need for many legal professionals. Autonomous vehicles don't merely make drivers more efficient—they replace them completely. The substitution effect is accelerating as computing power doubles every two years, creating capabilities that increase not linearly but exponentially. The evidence of this transition appears in labor market data. Since approximately 2000, employment rates among highly educated workers have declined, cognitive demands of college graduate jobs have stagnated, and wages for those positions have plateaued despite economic growth. These patterns suggest that traditional cognitive skills—the abilities to process information, perform analysis, and solve well-defined problems—are losing their premium value in the marketplace. However, this transition differs from previous ones in a critical way: while earlier technological revolutions primarily affected what people do, this one affects who people are. The skills becoming most valuable are not primarily about acquiring knowledge or mastering procedures, but about our capacity for social interaction, emotional connection, and collaborative creativity. As machine intelligence handles more routine cognitive work, uniquely human interpersonal abilities become the scarce, valuable resource. This suggests a profound shift from knowledge workers to relationship workers as the most valued contributors in tomorrow's economy.

Chapter 2: The Rise of Social Intelligence: Empathy as the Critical 21st-Century Skill

Empathy—the ability to discern what others are thinking and feeling, and to respond appropriately—has emerged as perhaps the most crucial skill for the future economy. This capacity forms the foundation for high-value human interaction that technology cannot replicate effectively. Employers across industries increasingly express their urgent need for empathetic workers. When scanning high-paying job listings, researchers found over a thousand positions specifically requesting empathy and related interpersonal skills. Even technology companies, creators of the digital tools transforming our work, prioritize these capabilities when hiring. The importance of empathy extends far beyond simple kindness. In medicine, research demonstrates that patients of highly empathetic doctors show better health outcomes, including improved disease management and fewer complications. They're also less likely to sue for malpractice, even when outcomes are poor. In business, customer service representatives with stronger empathy skills generate higher customer satisfaction and retention. Sales professionals who can accurately read and respond to customer emotions consistently outperform their peers. Surprisingly, this occurs not because empathy is a rational business strategy, but because humans respond to genuine human connection at a neurological level. This deeply human capacity evolved for survival reasons. Our ancestors who could accurately read the intentions and emotional states of others had significant advantages in cooperative group living. We are hardwired to respond to others' emotional states, often unconsciously. When we see someone express an emotion, even fleetingly, our facial muscles automatically begin to mirror that expression. Our pupils dilate or contract in response to others' pupil changes, signaling emotional states below conscious awareness. These responses create feedback loops of emotional communication that computers cannot participate in authentically. Paradoxically, as empathy becomes more economically valuable, it appears to be declining in prevalence. Research shows empathy has dropped significantly among college students since 1979, with the steepest declines occurring since 2000. This decline coincides with increased screen time, decreased face-to-face interaction, and reduced unstructured social play among children. Technology that connects us virtually seems to be atrophying the very social muscles that would make us most valuable in the emerging economy. The good news is that empathy can be developed. Healthcare organizations have shown remarkable results through structured empathy training programs. The military has transformed its training to emphasize cross-cultural empathy and social awareness. Educational programs that focus on reading literary fiction, role-playing, and structured perspective-taking exercises demonstrate significant improvements in empathetic capabilities. Rather than being a fixed trait, empathy appears to be a skill that can be systematically strengthened through deliberate practice—making it both valuable and attainable for those who recognize its importance.

Chapter 3: Team Dynamics: Why Human Collaboration Outperforms Technology

The significance of teamwork in creating value has risen dramatically even as technology has advanced. This represents a counterintuitive trend—as individual technological capabilities increase, the importance of collaborative human groups grows rather than diminishes. Evidence of this shift appears in a massive study of over 20 million research papers across 252 fields spanning 50 years, which reveals that breakthrough work increasingly comes from teams rather than individuals, and these teams are growing larger over time. Innovations that drive economic progress are now predominantly group achievements. What makes teams effective? Researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Union College discovered something remarkable: the collective intelligence of a team depends surprisingly little on the individual intelligence of its members. The average IQ of team members, or even the IQ of the smartest member, poorly predicts group performance. Instead, the strongest predictors were social sensitivity (the ability to read others' emotional states), conversational turn-taking (ensuring all members contribute equally), and the proportion of women in the group (who typically score higher on social sensitivity measures). When researchers equipped team members with electronic badges that captured tone of voice, physical positioning, gestures, and interaction patterns (but not the words being spoken), they found highly predictable patterns in successful teams. The most effective groups generated numerous ideas in brief contributions, engaged in rapid feedback cycles with members constantly responding to each other's ideas, and distributed participation equally among all members. These interaction patterns proved more important to team success than all other factors combined—including individual intelligence, technical skills, and personality traits. Face-to-face interaction proves especially powerful in enabling these productive patterns. When Bank of America experimented with giving call center teams synchronized breaks instead of staggered ones, simply increasing opportunities for casual interaction increased productivity dramatically. When technology company employees are physically proximate, their collaboration and innovation improve measurably. Research shows that communication between team members decreases in proportion to the square of the distance between them—even small increases in physical separation cause large drops in interaction. Online interaction, despite its convenience, fails to replicate these benefits fully. Studies show that virtual teams typically underperform face-to-face teams on complex tasks. Digital communication lacks the unconscious synchronization, mimicry, and non-verbal cues that build trust and understanding. Even when teams cannot meet in person, those with the strongest social sensitivity perform best in virtual environments, reinforcing the importance of human interactive skills regardless of medium. Paradoxically, the most effective team behaviors often appear economically irrational. Members of successful teams frequently help others without expectation of return, share information freely, and subordinate individual recognition to group success. These behaviors create environments where the best ideas emerge and are developed most effectively. The apparent paradox resolves when we recognize that humans evolved to cooperate in groups—we get neurochemical rewards from successful collaboration that bypass rational self-interest calculations. Teams that leverage these deep human tendencies outperform those relying on individual incentives and competition.

Chapter 4: The Power of Storytelling: Why Narrative Trumps Logic in Human Interaction

Storytelling represents one of humanity's most powerful and distinctly human capabilities. Every society on earth uses narrative; it appears to be a human universal. While the power of stories has long been recognized informally, recent research reveals that narrative affects us at neurological and chemical levels we cannot resist. When a person tells a story to an audience, functional MRI scans show remarkable "neural coupling"—the brains of both storyteller and listeners activate in synchronized patterns. The same regions light up not just in language centers but in areas processing emotions, intentions, and social understanding. This phenomenon explains why stories persuade and motivate more effectively than logical arguments or raw data. When the World Bank struggled to implement knowledge-sharing initiatives using traditional presentations with charts and bullet points, executive Stephen Denning discovered that telling a simple story about a health worker in Zambia accessing information transformed the organization's thinking. The narrative engaged listeners emotionally and spread throughout the organization, eventually reshaping the bank's strategic priorities. The effectiveness came not merely from the story's content but from its authentic, person-to-person delivery. The psychological research explains why. Humans appear hardwired to see narratives even where none exist. When shown simple geometric shapes moving on a screen, people spontaneously create stories about these shapes' "intentions" and "relationships." We cannot help but impose narrative structure on our experiences. Moreover, we particularly seek narratives about people. Our brains are "ready and eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities." This tendency begins in infancy—children under one year recognize "bullies" and "victims" in simple animated scenarios. The neurochemical impact of storytelling proves equally significant. Well-structured stories trigger the release of oxytocin, often called "the empathy hormone," which increases trust, generosity, and connection. Experimental subjects who watched emotionally engaging video narratives showed increased oxytocin levels and subsequently demonstrated greater generosity and compassion. However, not all narratives produce this effect. Stories following the classic structure—an ordinary situation disrupted by challenge, followed by struggle and resolution—generate the strongest neurochemical response. Stories also dramatically enhance memory and learning. Information presented in narrative form proves far more memorable than the same information presented as disconnected facts. This effect becomes even stronger when we retell stories ourselves. When recounting an experience, we automatically impose narrative structure even if the actual events were more chaotic. Our brains literally reconstruct our memories into more coherent stories each time we access them. The implications extend far beyond entertainment or education. Military strategists now recognize that conflicts are increasingly fought through competing narratives that motivate participants and shape public perceptions. Business leaders understand that corporate values and strategies gain traction through stories rather than mission statements. Healthcare providers discover that narrative techniques improve both patient compliance and practitioner effectiveness. In each domain, the most influential narratives come from authentic human sources, delivered with personal conviction. While computers can generate story structures, they cannot supply the human connection that gives narrative its greatest power.

Chapter 5: The Human Elements of Innovation: Creativity Beyond Algorithms

Creativity and innovation represent domains where human capabilities remain essential despite technological advances. Contrary to conventional wisdom, computers can indeed be creative. IBM's Watson has invented novel food combinations by analyzing chemical compounds and flavor profiles. Computers compose music in the style of Bach or Mozart that experts struggle to distinguish from the originals. Software generates coherent stories, paintings, and even poetry. These achievements demolish the myth that computers can only follow instructions without originality. However, the highest-value creativity remains fundamentally human for several key reasons. First, creativity in real-world settings typically involves solving problems that shift during the solution process. As we work toward answers, we frequently redefine the problem itself or discover unexpected opportunities. This fluid, adaptive approach requires humans who can continuously reframe objectives based on emerging insights—a capacity computers lack because they cannot independently determine what problems are worth solving or when goals should change. Second, the most valuable innovation emerges from human social processes. Research using sociometric badges reveals that the most creative teams engage in specific interaction patterns—they alternate between exploration (interacting with people outside the group) and engagement (intense interaction within the group). Exploration exposes team members to diverse perspectives and novel information, while engagement allows the group to develop and refine promising ideas collectively. These complementary activities create an idea flow that directly correlates with measurable creative output. Physical proximity proves surprisingly important to this process despite our interconnected digital world. Studies show that communication between people decreases with the square of the distance between them. This explains why innovation clusters like Silicon Valley remain powerful economic engines despite the availability of remote collaboration tools. Google and other innovative companies deliberately design workspaces to force random encounters between employees—arranging cafeteria lines, bathroom locations, and walking paths to maximize unplanned interactions. These "serendipitous collisions" spark creative connections that planned meetings rarely achieve. Trust emerges as another critical human element in innovation. Research shows that team members who face each other more, maintain eye contact, and feel comfortable confiding in one another produce more creative output. This may explain why many breakthrough innovations come from pairs of creators—think Jobs and Wozniak, Lennon and McCartney, or Watson and Crick. Pairs can develop deeper trust than larger groups while still providing diverse perspectives. The most creative pairs typically alternate between separate exploration and intense joint engagement, following the pattern observed in larger successful teams. Finally, human motivation affects creativity in ways computers cannot replicate. Research shows that intrinsic motivation (working for internal satisfaction) combined with prosocial motivation (wanting to help others) produces the most valuable innovations. People who are both internally driven and focused on others' needs generate ideas that are not just novel but genuinely useful. This explains why innovations that transform industries typically develop through extended human collaboration rather than individual flashes of insight. The process of refining ideas with potential users, incorporating feedback, and building enthusiastic coalitions remains distinctly human despite technological advancement.

Chapter 6: Gender Advantages: Women's Edge in the Emerging Economy

The transition to an economy valuing interpersonal skills creates significant advantages for women, who typically demonstrate stronger capabilities in many of these domains. Research on team effectiveness provides compelling evidence: the collective intelligence of groups correlates strongly with the proportion of women in the group. Teams with more women perform better on a wide range of tasks requiring problem-solving, moral judgment, creativity, and negotiation. This advantage stems primarily from women's higher average scores on measures of social sensitivity—the ability to read emotions and intentions from facial expressions and other nonverbal cues. The distinction runs deeper than socialization alone. Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has extensively documented neurological differences between typical male and female brains. Male brains tend toward "systemizing"—understanding rules that govern inanimate systems like machines, weather, or software. Female brains typically excel at "empathizing"—understanding mental states and emotions of others. These differences appear very early in development. One-day-old female infants look longer at faces than at mechanical objects, while male infants show the reverse preference. These tendencies can be detected even before birth by measuring prenatal testosterone exposure. This creates a profound economic irony: as technology increasingly masters the systematic tasks that have traditionally rewarded male cognitive styles, the empathizing capabilities more common in women become relatively more valuable. The jobs most resistant to automation require precisely the social and emotional intelligence that women, on average, bring more naturally. Technological advancement thus reverses a historical pattern where economic structures often favored male-typical abilities. Women also demonstrate advantages in several other domains increasingly valuable in rapidly changing environments. Research shows women typically maintain broader attentional focus—they notice and integrate more environmental information simultaneously. Men tend to focus more narrowly and deeply on specific targets. This scanning capability proves advantageous when detecting emerging threats or opportunities in complex, fast-changing situations. It may explain why female financial analysts like Meredith Whitney and regulators like Sheila Bair identified warning signs before the 2008 financial crisis while many traditionally focused analysts missed them. Women leaders also tend to take broader perspectives on organizational goals. Studies find female executives more likely to consider impacts beyond immediate financial metrics—they naturally incorporate effects on communities, environments, and multiple stakeholders. As businesses face increasing pressure to address social and environmental concerns alongside financial performance, this integrative perspective becomes more valuable. Similarly, women generally demonstrate greater comfort with uncertainty and adaptability to changing circumstances, critical traits in disruption-prone industries. However, these advantages depend significantly on organizational context. When groups foster status competition rather than collaboration, the benefits of female participation diminish dramatically. Similarly, certain leadership environments can suppress the expression of these valuable traits. The most effective organizations will create conditions that allow these capabilities to flourish rather than designing systems that neutralize them. Forward-thinking companies increasingly recognize that leveraging these strengths requires not just hiring more women but restructuring work processes to capitalize on collaborative, socially intelligent approaches.

Chapter 7: Building Human Skills: Practical Approaches to Developing Social Intelligence

The skills that will command highest value in the evolving economy—empathy, collaboration, creativity, and relationship-building—are fundamentally different from technical capabilities traditionally developed through education and training. These distinctly human abilities have historically been viewed as fixed traits rather than learnable skills. However, growing evidence demonstrates they can indeed be systematically developed through deliberate practice. Military organizations have pioneered many of the most effective approaches. The U.S. military transformed its training methods after discovering that realistic simulation dramatically improved performance in human domains. In the Vietnam War, fighter pilots trained in conventional methods achieved mediocre results against enemy aircraft despite superior American technology. The Navy then created the Top Gun program based on three principles: realistic opposition (instructors played the role of enemy pilots), comprehensive recording of all actions, and rigorous after-action reviews where participants candidly analyzed what worked and what failed. Fighter pilots trained this way improved their performance five-fold against identical opposition. These principles spread throughout military training. The Army created the National Training Center where entire units face opposition forces in realistic settings, followed by detailed reviews of every action. When fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military adapted these methods to develop cross-cultural skills—creating simulated villages with role-players to practice complex social interactions. Digital training tools extended these capabilities further, allowing soldiers to practice difficult conversations in virtual environments. These approaches proved far more effective than traditional classroom instruction in developing social capabilities. Healthcare organizations have implemented similar methods to build empathy. At Cleveland Clinic, doctors practice difficult conversations with actors portraying patients, followed by detailed feedback sessions. The program emphasizes specific skills: letting patients tell their stories without interruption, reading emotional cues, responding to unexpressed concerns, and building genuine relationships rather than following scripts. Participants practice in small groups, receive coaching, and continually refine their approaches. The results include better patient outcomes, reduced errors, and greater professional satisfaction. Companies increasingly apply these principles to develop interpersonal capabilities. Some use simulation techniques where teams face artificial challenges requiring collaborative problem-solving, followed by structured reflection on their interaction patterns. Others create realistic mock-ups of work environments where employees can experiment with new approaches to customer interactions or team coordination. Digital tools can supplement these experiences, though they prove most effective when combined with in-person practice and feedback. Education systems are also evolving to emphasize these skills. Leading business schools now devote significant curriculum time to structured experiential learning rather than technical knowledge transmission. Students work in teams on real-world problems, receiving detailed feedback on their collaborative processes. Harvard Business School requires students to launch actual businesses in teams, focusing as much on their interaction dynamics as on business outcomes. Stanford places first-year students in high-pressure simulations where they must collaborate effectively under stress. The humanities provide another pathway to developing these capabilities. Reading literary fiction demonstrably improves empathy by allowing readers to experience different perspectives. The study of history, philosophy, and culture builds contextual understanding essential for cross-cultural effectiveness. These disciplines, sometimes dismissed as impractical, develop precisely the human sensibilities that technology cannot replicate and that increasingly determine economic success.

Summary

The fundamental conclusion emerging from this exploration is that as technology advances, human value will increasingly center on distinctly human traits rather than technical knowledge. The most economically valuable capabilities will not be what we know but who we are—our capacity for empathy, collaboration, creativity, and relationship-building. This represents a profound reversal of historical trends, where economic progress has typically rewarded increasingly specialized technical knowledge. Instead, we are witnessing a return to valuing our most essential human nature. This transition creates both challenges and opportunities. Many people who invested heavily in developing analytical capabilities may find those skills increasingly commoditized by technology. Organizational structures built around individual expertise rather than collaborative effectiveness will struggle. Educational systems still largely designed to transmit knowledge rather than develop interpersonal capabilities require fundamental redesign. Yet for those who recognize this shift, the potential rewards are substantial. Developing these deeply human skills allows us to create value in ways that technology cannot replicate and that other humans deeply value. Perhaps most profoundly, this economic transformation aligns our material interests with our deeper human needs. After centuries where economic imperatives often required suppressing human instincts for connection and collaboration, we now enter an era where economic success depends precisely on expressing our most essentially human qualities. The challenge is not to compete against machines at their increasingly impressive capabilities, but to become more fully human in ways that machines cannot match. By doing so, we create not just economic value but more meaningful work and lives—becoming not less ourselves in the technological future, but more authentically who we have always been.

About Author

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Geoff Colvin

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.Geoff (Geoffrey) Colvin has a degree in economics from Harvard and an M.B.A. from New York University. He is an author, a broadcaster, and speaker. He is also Senior Editor-at-Large of Fortune Magazine.

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