Whether you’re an actuary or an activist, a scientist or a soldier, you’ll work in an augmented way, with software relieving you of a lot of cognitive heavy lifting and tedium, and you doubling down on the human strengths that will still be the key to moving your enterprise forward. So the thing to focus on in college is gaining experience in working with smart machines—learning what they’re capable of and what you’re capable of. Choose your class projects with an eye to this. Ask: What problem could I solve in this field if I had a tireless, number-crunching fiend as a teammate? What if I had a partner capable of retrieving from memory instantly, and discerning patterns in seemingly chaotic information? When you arrive in the workplace, that’s exactly what you’ll have. And you’ll rise fast if you know how to do big things with it.

Joel Mokyr, a professor of economics at Northwestern University and the author of A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy

There are three skills that will count in the future. One is to learn how to access information. Because no set of skills will be unaffected by continued and probably accelerating technological progress, it is important to be able to find out that what you know is obsolete, and keep updating. To do that you have to know where to find that information quickly, cheaply, and effectively, sorting the reliable from the crackpot websites.

The other skill is learning to unlearn. People tend to learn certain skills and rules of thumb and then cling to them more rigidly as they grow older. It’s important to condition people that they have to be able to unlearn and start over, though that is a tall task.

A third skill is how to survive in the gig economy. As more and more economic activity will be carried out by small independent operators, the ideas embedded in a corporate culture will become increasingly irrelevant. The corporation of the future will be a much looser association of various flexible, mostly small-scale, units. As 3-D manufacturing and on-demand services proliferate, I think Uber- or TaskRabbit-like outfits are more plausible than General Electric. Remember, the big corporation is a modern invention—there were very few of them in 1870. They are not a natural necessity.

My last dream is that people will also be educated (as opposed to trained) to make more of their leisure. Why really is it that we teach people math and computer skills but not how to read Herodotus and Proust, or enjoy Bach and Schoenberg? In the fairly near future, we will basically get rid of boring routine jobs, and in the end only the people who want to work because their work is fulfilling and fun (like my job) will work. Just as nobody sells subway tokens or sorts suitcases anymore, people will do things that, on the whole, are fun. I hope people will not be just playing Pokémon Go. But even if they do (or play some virtual-reality version of it), it beats selling subway tokens.