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In today’s workplace where many employers favor technical know-how over emotional aptitude, soft skills seem to be less desirable but for Professor Kellee TSAI, Dean of HKUST’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS), creativity is deemed to be an essential skill for the future of work. The world is moving toward automation at speed, today’s cutting edge technology and patents may become obsolete within years, while skills like critical thinking and creativity on the other hand, do not. At a time when AI and other forms of advanced machine learning are gaining prominence, it would be unwise for humans to only focus on mastering abilities that can be easily outsourced to computers, warns Prof. Tsai.

It is common to hear non-arts undergraduate students complain about being forced to take humanities classes that have nothing to do with their area of study or career aspirations. But Dr. Daisy DU Yan, Associate Professor from Division of Humanities, thinks otherwise. Scientists and engineers should study arts and humanities to better understand what their inventions mean to society and humanity.  It is Dr. Du’s mission to involve more and more students in her classes and help them become critical and creative thinkers with a sense of empathy. “Humanities has soft power. Sometimes it can have an even bigger influence on people than scientific inventions,” she adds, bringing examples from history, from Shakespeare to LU Xun, an impactful Chinese writer who started out studying medicine, but later became a writer as he believed in the greater power of words than medicine on people.