The Turing Trap is turning into a Talent Trap: The wrong AI strategy could strand millions of skilled workers

Amidst the heated debate on the effect of Artificial Intelligence on our economy, our society, and even our survival lies a deeper sense of loss of control, with debates framed as “what will AI do?” This implicit passivity assumes that technology, rather than people, will determine AI’s impact on work.

Before we buy into dangerous self-fulfilling prophecies, leaders in technology, business, society – and all of us – need to recognize the twin traps ahead, so we can avoid them.

In 2022, Prof Eric Brynjolfsson identified and named the “Turing Trap” , the mistake of treating the goal of AI as imitating humans so machines can replace them, rather than building systems that complement and extend human capabilities.

If the Turing Trap is a mistaken engineering perspective on AI, its damaging counterpart is the Talent Trap , a widely-held but deeply flawed view of workers.

In Talent Trap thinking, society has a fixed amount of talent, developed mostly in schools, defined by educational attainment, and companies win by securing that limited pool of talent rather than growing it widely.

It says some people are “talent” to be pursued, cultivated, and developed; others are “labor” to be plugged into a well-defined process determined by others, without the autonomy to exercise judgment.

The Talent Trap worldview treats human workers as fixed realities, not as working learners.

So as AI hits benchmarks on more cognitive tasks, those tasks, and eventually jobs, go away, pushing humans into more physically intensive tasks or creating new roles accessible mainly to those with new advanced degrees in emerging fields.

It also places the burden of adapting workers to an AI economy mostly upon schools, universities, and formal retraining programs.

The beliefs that could drive us into an AI Talent Trap are wrong.

Human workers’ potential is not fixed, most learning is outside formal education, and job-relevant skills are best developed by working with other people and tools to solve customer, company, or community problems.

Higher education has a vital role, but employers’ most important talent pipeline is the 10 million U.S. workers who parlay skills gained on the job into higher-paid, in-demand jobs each year, a talent pool five times more than new college graduates.

Half these upwardly mobile workers are Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs), without college degrees , and they are concentrated in a surprisingly small set of ‘gateway’ jobs.

Employers, not schools, shape this talent pipeline.