The Strange Quest of Defining 'Human Skills'

How AI is forcing us to upskill on what makes us human

Anna Katharina Schaffner

This article was originally published on Psychology Today on 23 September 2026.

Everyone is now talking about “human skills.” The term has been around for a while, having gradually replaced the belittling “soft skills” to capture social and emotional intelligence, as well as people skills such as the capacity to relate, communicate effectively, collaborate, and motivate others.

But more recently, “human skills” has acquired a new urgency. We increasingly use it as a catch-all term to describe our comparative advantage in an AI-saturated world. The viral takeover of this phrase is worth analysing.

We are the first generation to work in a no longer exclusively human workforce. AI is not simply another technical tool, like the calculator, the computer, or the internet. Increasingly, we are working alongside AI agents as invisible colleagues, and may even find ourselves competing with them in the job market and losing out. Organisations no longer have to design solely for human-human interactions, but also for human-agent, agent-agent, and agent-human ones.

And because AI can take over entire workstreams, processes, and tasks that used to take us hours, weeks, or months, it requires us to rethink how work itself is organised.

More existentially, it forces us to ask anew what we can do that AI can't. Where and how do we still bring value? What kinds of problems are uniquely ours to solve?

What Kind of Animals Are We?

First, there is something deeply strange about the very idea of defining an entire species by its unique skill-set. Imagine other species engaging in the same exercise. What would cats put on their list of distinctive feline skills? Sleeping for sixteen hours while remaining convinced of their own superiority? Occasional rodent control combined with an extraordinary capacity for eliciting unconditional service from another species? And turtles – extreme patience? Portable housing? Graceful aging? The thought experiment is absurd, of course. But it makes me sad that we even have to go there – humans up-skilling their species-defining markers. Kind of dehumanising. Like the term ‘human resources’ – who ever thought that casting ourselves as replaceable resource, mere means to an end, was a good idea?

Previously, we defined our special gifts in relation to other animals and put ourselves at the top of the pyramid. Some thinkers have cast us as predominantly rational, social, or political animals; as homo ludens or homo economicus. Others have emphasised our relational, creative, caring or problem-solving capacities. We are certainly imaginative animals, able to envision a desired future state and working towards it. We are capable of appreciation too: we can fall on our knees and decide to serve causes that transcend our own narrow self-interest. We are self-aware, metacognitive, art-making and tool-making beings.

But when we pitch our species against AI, our story about what makes us unique and valuable changes. Now, we find ourselves in the position of having to explain why we are more than clumsy, costly, vulnerable, and profoundly limited meat-puppets running on inferior wetware. Cory Doctorow had a good comeback to that, calling AI “word-guessing machines”, arguing that statistical inference is not thinking.

But we can no longer easily put ourselves at the top of the pyramid. Cognitive intelligence – reasoning, analysis, pattern recognition, language, and problem-solving – no longer works particularly well as the dividing line. These are precisely the areas in which AI has become extraordinarily capable.

Instead, the emphasis has shifted towards emotional and social intelligence: understanding ourselves and others, regulating emotions, empathising, navigating relationships and group dynamics. We emphasise creativity, judgement, metacognition, moral reasoning, imagination, and meaning-making. We also point to our embodied intelligence: interoception and what the body knows matters.

Story Intelligence

There is another form of intelligence I would add to the list of human skills: Story Intelligence™. I define Story Intelligence™ as our capacity to recognise, interpret, challenge, and consciously shape the stories that drive our emotions and behaviour.

For I believe that we are, above all, storytelling animals. We don't simply register reality. We constantly narrativise it. We select and filter information, decide what matters, connect events through cause and effect, assign motives and interpret what things mean.

And we do this not just individually but collectively. Families have stories. Organisations have stories. Nations have stories. They tell us who we are, what matters, who is to blame, what is possible, and what should happen next.

Story Intelligence™ therefore isn't simply the ability to tell a compelling story. It is the higher-order capacity to see stories as stories: to recognise the narratives shaping our perception, examine the assumptions embedded within them, understand how they influence behaviour, and revise them when they cease to serve us.

AI, of course, can tell stories. It can generate them at astonishing speed, imitate voices, and propose alternative interpretations. But Story Intelligence™ is essentially a metacognitive skill – and a cultural intelligence skill. It is the ability to defuse from stories that do not serve us, and to distinguish more clearly between fact and interpretation.

Intelligence with Stakes

There is another core distinction. Humans are embodied, embedded, and encultured creatures. We occupy a particular body, biography, culture, place, and moment in history. We have wants, needs, fears, and desires. We form attachments. We suffer. We care. We know that our time is finite. We know that we are mortal. Things matter to us.

AI has intelligence without stakes. We have intelligence with stakes – we literally have skin in the game. AI can analyse grief. We can grieve. It can describe desire. We can desire. It can model a difficult conversation. We have to have them. It can identify competing values. We have to choose which value to honour – and live with what follows.

The same applies to stories. AI can generate a story about who we are, what something means, or what we should do next. But we are the creatures who have to live inside those stories and experience their consequences.

This is why I think Story Intelligence™ will become ever more important in the age of AI. As machines become increasingly capable of generating information, arguments, interpretations, and narratives, our challenge will not simply be to produce more of them. It will be to discern which stories we are allowing to organise our attention and behaviour. Which interpretations deserve our trust? Which assumptions are hiding inside them? Which stories narrow our possibilities, and which open them up?

Perhaps, then, we need a more robust definition of human skills. Human skills are not simply whatever abilities AI hasn't mastered yet. That would trap us in a losing race against technological development.

They are the capacities arising from our embodied, emotional, relational, and meaning-making nature that allow us to exercise judgement, navigate ambiguity, form relationships, create meaning, and take responsibility for action. And among them, I would argue, is the distinctly human responsibility to become more intelligent about the stories by which we live.

Images: Marc Schulte and Igor Omilaev @Unsplash