All across America, students are anxiously finishing their “What I Want To Be …” college application essays, advised to focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) by experts and parents who insist that’s the only way to become workforce ready. But two recent studies of workplace success contradict the traditional wisdom about “hard skills”.

Google originally set its hiring systems to sort for computer science students with top grades from top science universities. In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring theory by quickly dealing with large amounts hiring, firing, and promotion data collected since the company’s establishment.

Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM capability comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing comprehension into others; being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

Those characteristics sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer. Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despite their technical training, not because of it? After bringing in more experts to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs (Master of Business Adminstration).

Project Aristotle, a study released by Google this past spring, further supports the importance of soft skills even in high-tech environments. Project Aristotle analyzes data on inventive and productive teams. Google takes pride in its A-teams, assembled with top scientists, each with the most specialized knowledge and able to throw down one creative idea after another. Its data analysis revealed, however, that the company’s most important and productive new ideas come from B-teams comprised of employees who don’t always have to be the smartest people in the room.

Project Aristotle shows that the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, understanding, and emotional intelligence. And topping the list: emotional safety. To succeed, each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes. They must know they are being heard.

STEM skills are vital to the world we live in today, but technology alone, as Steve Jobs famously insisted, is not enough. We desperately need those who are educated to the human, cultural, and social as well as the computational.

People worry that developments in Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., will bring about a point in history when A. I. overtakes human intelligence, leading to an unimaginable revolution in human affairs. Or they wonder whether instead of our controlling artificial intelligence, it will control us.

The situation may not arise for hundreds of years to come, but this doesn’t mean we have nothing to worry about. On the contrary, The A. I. products that now exist are improving faster than most people realize and promise to fundamentally transform our world, not always for the better. They are only tools, not a competing form of intelligence. But they will reshape what work means and how wealth is created.

Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, the A. I. revolution is not taking certain jobs and replacing them with other jobs. Instead, it is believed to cause a wide - scale elimination of jobs -- mostly lower - paying jobs, but some higher - paying ones, too.

This transformation will result in enormous profits for the companies that develop A.I., as well as for the companies that adopt it. We are thus facing two developments that do not sit easily together; enormous wealth concentrated in relatively few hands and enormous numbers of people out of work. What is to be done?

Part of the answer will involve educating or retraining people in tasks A.I. tools aren’t good at. Artificial intelligence is poorly suited for jobs involving creativity, planning and “cross - field” thinking. But these skills are typically required by high - paying jobs that may be hard to retrain displaced workers to do. More promising are lower - paying jobs involving the “people skills” that A.I. lacks: social workers, barmen, doormen -- professions requiring human interaction. But how many barmen does a society really need?

The solution to the problem of mass unemployment will involve “service jobs of love.” These are jobs that A. I. cannot do, that society needs and that give people a sense of purpose. Examples include accompanying an older person to visit a doctor, helping at an orphanage and serving as a sponsor at charity organization. The volunteer service jobs of today, in other words, may turn into the real jobs of the future.

Other volunteer jobs may be higher - paying and professional, such as compassionate medial service providers. In all cases, people will be able to choose to work fewer hours than they do now.