The Future of Work: Creative, Skills & Human Potential in the Age of AI (KIE Creativity Book Series)

What will remain uniquely human when artificial intelligence can generate ideas, automate tasks, and reshape entire professions?

The Future of Work: Creativity, Skills & Human Potential in the Age of AI explores this urgent question through eleven interdisciplinary chapters examining how creativity, judgment, learning, leadership, well-being, and responsible human agency can be strengthened in an increasingly algorithmic world.

Edited by Fredricka Reisman, PhD, with a foreword by James Ogunleye, PhD, this 374-page volume brings together researchers, educators, and practitioners to move the conversation beyond technological productivity. Rather than treating people as passive recipients of change, the book presents them as active participants who can question, imagine, collaborate, adapt, and shape more humane futures of work.

Across the volume, contributors examine:

• Creativity as an everyday, social, and communicative capacity rather than the preserve of exceptional individuals
• The transformation of creative production through digital platforms, distributed work, and algorithmic mediation
• The need for creative education that develops systemic literacy, adaptive agency, and platform fluency
• Creative training as a foundation for employability, workplace innovation, confidence, curiosity, and organisational resilience
• How universities can redesign curricula around critical thinking, digital capability, interdisciplinary collaboration, and adaptive expertise
• Creative engagement as a source of health, well-being, connection, flexibility, and purpose
• Human–AI co-creativity and the capacities needed to preserve judgment, responsibility, and meaningful human contribution
• The 7 Muses—Independence, Curiosity, Playfulness, Confidence, Openness, Interdependence, and Passion—as developable capacities for learning, leadership, and AI-supported work
• Psychological safety as a condition for responsible judgment, experimentation, and collaborative learning
• Creativity as human judgment under uncertainty, rather than mere novelty generation or computational recombination
• New ways of measuring creativity, innovation, adaptability, collaboration, and human impact beyond conventional productivity metrics

The book also introduces practical and conceptual frameworks, including ACT, the Creative Training Capability Framework, the Neuro-Creative Cycle, the 7 Muses of Leadership, the Human Crack Framework, and the Human Impact Framework. Together, these models offer educators, leaders, organisations, and policymakers tools for cultivating the human capabilities that technology cannot replace.

The volume concludes with Creativity Summit: Guilford 2.0, a collaborative initiative of the Global Creativity Initiative and the Freddie Reisman Center for Translational Research in Creativity and Motivation, connecting the book’s ideas to a wider international movement in creativity research and practice.

Essential reading for educators, researchers, organisational leaders, learning and development professionals, policymakers, students, and anyone interested in the future of work, this book argues that the central challenge of the AI age is not simply learning how to use intelligent technologies. It is learning how to preserve and expand the distinctly human capacities to create, judge, connect, care, and act responsibly.