AI era highlights long-term thinking as a future-proof career skill

This piece captures a quiet but important shift in how serious educators are talking about AI: away from ‘which jobs survive’ and toward ‘which cognitive habits survive’. The argument is that AI will steadily eat codified, feedback‑rich tasks, but will keep struggling with open‑ended decisions that play out over years—urban planning, capital allocation, regulatory strategy, climate adaptation, and so on. ([indiatoday.in](https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/featurephilia/story/long-term-thinking-career-skills-ai-era-2844092-2025-12-30))

From an AGI‑race perspective, that reframes human comparative advantage in a world where frontier models handle much of the execution layer. If labs do succeed in training systems that match or surpass human performance on most short‑horizon tasks, the scarce resource becomes people who can reason about second‑ and third‑order effects, design institutions, and decide when *not* to optimize a metric an AI is pushing. Those skills aren’t just ‘nice careers’; they’re exactly what we’ll need to steer powerful models away from brittle, high‑risk equilibria.

For the ecosystem around AGI builders, this also hints at what talent portfolios should look like. Teams dominated by fast‑iterate builders but light on long‑horizon thinkers will ship impressive demos and then run into governance and adoption walls. Conversely, universities and training programs that treat long‑term thinking, scenario analysis, and systems design as core competencies will feed the scarce leadership roles that remain robust in an AI‑saturated economy.