There's No Such Thing as "Robot-Proofing"

Last December, entrepreneur Amin Khoury gave Northeastern University's College of Computer Science a $50 million gift. The money was slated for programs that would help new graduates compete in a marketplace increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence and automation. The university's press release touted, "As the global economy adapts to the influence of artificial intelligence … Northeastern is empowering humans to be agile learners, thinkers, and creators, beyond the capacity of any machine." The school, like quite a few others, is reimagining itself as an incubator for skills that are difficult to automate: creativity, imagination, mental flexibility. Indeed, Joseph Aoun, Northeastern's president, literally wrote the book on this.