Why it’s So Hard to Train Robots Soft Skills
What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills — the personal attributes, personality traits, inherent social cues, and communication abilities needed for success on the job. They characterize how a person interacts in his or her relationships with others. They include things like adaptability, communication, creative thinking, conflict resolution, etc.

This is the opposite of hard skills, which are job-specific skills you can gain through education, certifications, and training. This could include anything from computer programming to wood framing, depending on the job.

Soft Skills > Hard Skills

Nowadays, more and more people are hiring based on soft skills rather than hard skills for a multitude of reasons.

For one, it’s leagues harder to learn new soft skills rather than hard skills. Learning soft skills requires personal dedication to development, and of course, the “curriculum” looks different for everyone. For instance, one may learn empathy after doing something wrong, through a role model, etc.

But with hard skills, one could learn anything with enough practice and guidance. A great example is with computer science — whether one has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or learned coding from doing boot camps doesn’t matter, as long as you can do the job. Plus, it doesn’t matter how personally dedicated you are. As long as you do the work, you’ll learn the skills, no matter how you feel about the topic.

Other than training, soft skills are also necessary for the workplace. New, modern companies no longer look like the traditional 9-to-5 day with people in suits sitting in a cubby all day. It’s evolved to be more casual, personal, and collaborative. Even if you have a bunch of fancy credentials, if you’re an asshole to work with, you won’t last very long.

Programming Soft Skills

Neural networks were inspired by the neurons in our brains. Reinforcement learning parallels how humans learn through trial and error. So, let’s draw upon human experience. How did you learn to be empathetic, to understand people’s needs, or to be a team player? We learn from mistakes.

Let’s say I was trying to create an algorithm to draw a dog.

Draw a circle. Draw a face. Draw ears.

… And so on.
['Alexis Wang']
['Soft Skills', 'Robots', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Automation', 'Technology']