Many everyday tasks are now handled by machines rather than people, and some believe this makes human skills less valuable.

Nowadays machines do many tasks that people did before, for example in factories, banks and shops. Some people believe that because of this, human skills are not valuable anymore. I partly agree with this opinion.

On the one hand, it is true that some skills are less useful now. In the past, a person who could calculate quickly or write neatly could find a good job easily. Today computers do these things faster and without mistakes, so these abilities are not special anymore. Many workers in factories also lost their jobs because robots can do the same work all day without rest. For these people, their skills really became less valuable.

On the other hand, machines cannot do everything. They cannot understand emotions, they cannot make difficult decisions when the situation is new, and they cannot create original ideas. Doctors, teachers and managers still need these human abilities every day. In fact, because machines do the simple work, people have more time for the difficult work, and these skills become more important than before.

In conclusion, I agree that some simple and repeated skills lost their value because of machines. However, I do not agree that human skills in general are less valuable, because the skills that machines cannot copy are now more necessary.

Machines now perform a great many tasks that were once done by hand, and it is sometimes argued that this has made human ability worth less. In my view the statement is true of one particular kind of skill and misleading about the rest.

There is no doubt that routine competence has been devalued, and rapidly. Skills that consist of applying a fixed rule reliably — arithmetic, filing, assembling a component in the same sequence a thousand times a day — were valuable precisely because humans found them tiring and machines could not do them at all. Once that second condition changed, the market price of those abilities collapsed. Anyone whose working life was built on being accurate and tireless rather than on being adaptable has genuinely lost ground, and it would be dishonest to describe this as anything other than a loss.

The general claim, however, does not follow. Automation removes the predictable part of a job and leaves the ambiguous part behind, and the ambiguous part is the part that requires judgement. A doctor whose diagnostic scans are read by software still has to decide what to tell a frightened patient; a manager whose reports generate themselves still has to decide which of two defensible plans to back. Because these tasks now make up a larger share of the work rather than a smaller one, the skills they demand command a higher premium than before, not a lower one.

In conclusion, I agree that machines have made rule-based skills far less valuable, but the wider claim confuses a change in which skills matter with a decline in the value of human skill itself.

That machines now do work people used to do is not in dispute. Whether this has made human skill less valuable depends entirely on which skills are meant, and the statement's weakness is that it does not distinguish. My own position is that it is accurate about a narrow and shrinking category of ability, and wrong about the direction of travel overall.

Where it holds is with skills that are legible to a machine — competences that can be written down as a rule and then executed identically every time. These were valuable for a contingent reason rather than an intrinsic one: they were scarce because they were tedious, not because they were difficult. Once software could perform them without fatigue, that scarcity evaporated and the skills were commoditised almost overnight. The human cost of this is real and is often understated by people who benefit from the substitution, and any honest answer has to concede it.

The general claim nevertheless inverts what automation actually does. Machines absorb the predictable component of a task and hand back the residual — the ambiguous, contested, high-consequence part that could not be specified in advance. That residual is where judgement lives. A radiologist relieved of routine scanning does not become less necessary; the proportion of their day spent on genuinely difficult calls rises, and difficult calls are what they were trained for. The same logic runs through law, teaching and management: the work that remains is harder, and harder work is not cheaper.

What makes the original intuition so persuasive, I think, is that it observes displacement and infers devaluation. But the two are distinct. A skill can become worthless while human skill in aggregate becomes more valuable, because value tracks scarcity, and what automation makes scarce is precisely the capacity to act well when there is no rule to follow.

I therefore agree with the statement only in its narrow sense. Machines have destroyed the market for being reliably routine. They have simultaneously raised the price of everything humans do that a rule cannot capture, which is a poor description of skills becoming less valuable.