Beyond ‘foomscrolling’: The UAE’s vision for an AI-powered human workforce

Not long ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that up to 30% of the Microsoft code is now written by AI. Paradoxically, statistics show a surge in the job announcements for software testers, aimed at testing the AI generated code. The recruitment surge for software testers is aligned with the World Economic Forum prediction of a 7% job growth rate by 2030.

As a university educator, I observe growing anxiety among Gen Z students about technological unemployment, a fear amplified by foomscrolling - an addictive scrolling through news feeds to find breakthrough technology stories. This behaviour fuels and creates ground for scam tech startups, as seen in the Theranos scandal exposed by the Wall Street Journal. Social media companies also exploit foomscrolling to enable behaviour modification and psychological manipulation, a phenomenon explored in the Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma”.

Tech unemployment

The idea of technological unemployment stems from the behaviour modification and psychological manipulation resulting in the belief that technology is the panacea of all our woes. Foomscrolling makes one believe that AI is replacing human professionals - writers, programmers, teachers, doctors, and postmen, to name a few. This over-simplified substitution of AI tools with human workers, seems like an impoverished view of who we humans are. For example, as an educator, I spot right away the obvious fluffy and verbose content that ChatGPT tends to produce, when I am assessing student assignments. The human mind is capable of doing way more than anticipating a paragraph’s following sentence - the core principle of generative AI tools.

The human intellect has evolved over centuries to love and bond, to appreciate beauty and intelligence, and to pursue happiness. Michael Ignatieff – the Canadian academician – compared the human intelligence with AI in the following words: “What we do is not processing. It is not computation. It is not data analysis. It is a distinctively, incorrigibly human activity that is a complex combination of conscious and unconscious, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional reflection.” The inability to encode such diverse, subjective, and universally un-defined human values into machines means that even the most sophisticated AI systems fundamentally lack empathy, consciousness, moral reasoning, and the unique perspective born from individual human experience.

Focus on workforce upgradation

The UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031 exemplifies a proactive approach, focusing on workforce upgradation, that integrates AI into key society domains like education, healthcare, and transportation. The strategy aims to equip the workforce for the emerging AI-powered job-market, using proactive initiatives, such as AI camps, UAE Government Leaders programme, Zero Government Bureaucracy programme, UAE’s Digital Government Strategy 2025. The acquired digital skills will be applied to streamline operations, reduce manual effort, and improve accuracy, leading to substantial time and cost savings. This will result in the transformation of job roles, introducing newer and more efficient methods of performing old jobs, empowering the key sectors to operate more efficiently. This workforce development strategy will tackle the constrained unavailability of sufficiently skilled workers, thereby efficiently responding to the Gen Z anxiety of technological unemployment.

However, as with any evolving technology, an efficient change management strategy will be required to overcome the related challenges, namely: reluctance to adopt new technology infused business processes, and the bias in AI-powered algorithms leading to discrimination.

Human-centred society

The future workforce vision is to strive for a human-centred society by an enhanced partnership between humans and AI powered systems. With this partnership, machines take over the monotonous, tedious, and repetitive tasks, while creative jobs rest with humans. This will certainly change the organisational processes across multiple sectors - media, higher education, finance, retail, manufacturing, construction and healthcare, to name a few. But the human professionals across the board will remain irreplaceable by AI.

Even as AI tools advance to enable LLM based personalised learning, assist in robotic surgeries or manage drone-based letter deliveries, they remain fundamentally incapable of replicating - let alone replacing - crucial human qualities. They cannot, for instance, inspire a student’s curiosity, extend genuine empathy to a patient, communicate an emotional narrative with a writer’s depth, or provide a friendly interaction that goes beyond logistical letter delivery like a postman. The unique human traits can never be algorithmic output(s).

The anxiety about AI-driven technological unemployment, fuelled by “foomscrolling” and excessive techno-optimism, misunderstands both AI’s limitations and humanity’s profound strengths. By embracing a strategy that prioritises human adaptation, ethical integration, and the cultivation of those irreplaceable human values — empathy, creativity, and critical thinking — the UAE is not only preparing the Gen Z workforce for the future; it is also actively constructing a human-centric society powered by AI tools, endorsing that the real revolution lies in human ingenuity augmented by smart systems.

Meanwhile, besides exploring innovative job opportunities, Gen Z has plenty of existing professions to choose from — before the alleged AI takeover begins.

Imran Taj is an Assistant Professor in Zayed University, Abu Dhabi.