The Human Advantage
- Jodi-Tatiana Charles
- Sep 2
- 3 min read
September 2, 2025
I am a CBS Sunday Morning News nerd, I grew up with the program. I never miss it, no matter where I am. If I am home, I make the time, and if I am traveling, I stream it. The show is part of my weekly ritual because it is one of the few places where news, culture, and curiosity are treated with both intelligence and humanity. The recent segment on jobs most and least vulnerable to artificial intelligence stopped me in my tracks. It felt less like television and more like a thoughtful conversation with a friend about what excites us and what makes us uneasy about the future of “work”.
The segment offered two lists. One named jobs most at risk of automation: coding, accounting, copywriting, translating, customer service, paralegal work, illustration, graphic design, songwriting, and information management. The other named jobs considered safe: healthcare, teaching, mental health, social assistance, police and fire, engineering, construction, renewable energy, tourism, plumbing, and electrical work. At first glance, these lists might appear obvious. But look closer, and they reveal a deeper truth about what it means to create value in a world where machines are gaining ground.
The vulnerable jobs share one characteristic: they rely on pattern recognition and replication. Coding can be reduced to systems of rules. Accounting runs on formulas. Customer service often follows scripts. Even creative roles like copywriting or illustration are threatened when creativity is defined as producing outputs that echo familiar styles. AI is built to excel in precisely these areas, so it is no surprise that the segment placed them in the danger zone.
The safer jobs highlight the opposite. They depend on empathy, adaptability, and situational judgment. A nurse cannot be replaced by an algorithm because care is more than diagnosis. A teacher is more than a content delivery system because education is about connection and improvisation. Skilled trades require problem solving on the spot, not in a lab. Even tourism thrives because of shared experiences and emotional connection. These roles remind us that resilience comes from being human in ways machines cannot copy.
The insight here is not a reason to panic but to pivot. If our work is built only on producing outputs that can be standardized, we should expect automation to encroach. But if our work draws on context, vulnerability, and trust, we remain indispensable. The challenge is to stop defining value by speed and volume alone and instead claim the dimensions of work that resist automation.
This means doubling down on storytelling that carries cultural nuance and lived experience. It means interpreting data with an awareness of history and identity, something AI cannot do. Most of all, it means focusing on trust. Audiences may appreciate efficiency, but what they remember, and reward is sincerity. Trust cannot be automated. It is built over time, through transparency and consistency.
It is worth remembering that technological upheaval is not new. The printing press, the assembly line, and the internet all disrupted work and created fear. They also created new opportunities. The difference with AI is its reach. For the first time, both manual and knowledge-based work are affected at once. That is daunting, but it also makes the lesson clearer. We need to define our roles not by what can be produced but by how meaning is made.
The CBS Sunday Morning segment was not a prophecy of doom but an invitation. It reminded us that the future belongs to those who lean into qualities that cannot be digitized. Adaptability, authenticity, and empathy are not soft skills. They are survival skills. If we keep cultivating them, the machines can take the tasks, but we will always keep the trust.