Animoca’s Siu Says This One Trait Will Matter Most for Job Seekers in the AI Era

Artificial intelligence is likely to shake up the job market, but in the long run it should generate more employment and place a higher premium on human creativity, according to Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu.

Speaking on the sidelines of the SuperAI conference in Singapore, Siu said modern systems often push people to suppress their natural creativity in order to fit structured, repetitive forms of work. “We’re born creative, and we’re losing our creativity to fit into a system because we’re trying to be turned into machines and do actions that are sort of regular,” he said.

He argued that people can preserve that creative edge while machines take over more routine tasks.

Taking an optimistic view, Siu said that shift could allow people to focus more fully on distinctly human strengths. “That means we can all be free to be creative, because machines can ultimately deliver what we need to do on that side of things, while we can be truly human,” he said.

Animoca, which Siu co-founded in 2014, now has more than 600 companies in its portfolio across gaming, decentralized finance, and real-world assets.

AI is “going to be creating a lot more jobs,” Siu said, though noted that there will be a disruption as well.

“The superpower of an AI is it can code everything,” and its coding skills “will eventually surpass that of humans…. We have a real commoditization on capability and intelligence, which means that the skill has to be about creativity and coordination,” he said.

When asked about Anthropic’s recent warning on the dangers of AI usage, Siu said he falls “on the optimistic side.”

“Most people are going to be using AI in a way that would be beneficial,” he said. “There’ll be a few people that will do bad things, they would have to be stopped, but… this, to me, doesn’t feel like it’s a nuclear arms race.”