(Probably) the most precious skill

 What gets paid the most? Which skill should one acquire ? What skill may not become irrelevant due to AI or something else in future? As every profession worries about getting automated or diminished relevance or impact , this question is worth probing.

Why does a CEO or a Captain of a sports team or a leader get paid multiple times more than a player or an employee? Do they put in X times more hours than the player/worker? Do they work X times harder? ( they have the same number of hours in a day/week as others). Also for something to be shielded from automation, it cannot be predictable or repeatable. It needs to be vague enough to not fit into rules but valuable enough to make significant impact ( to justify those sums).

Leaders have capital/resources/players at their disposal and multiple people may have the same options. What perhaps distinguishes and makes impact, is judgement. In close encounter games, a small steer/nudge/decision by the leader changes the game for everyone and determines the end result. If that judgement works ( at least most of the time), the money paid is well worth it. On large decisions, the right judgement ( which probably has taken much less time or effort ) has an outsized impact. A slightly better steer has a huge differential gain. The scale of the decision/resources amplifies the impact of the judgement.

Once the basics are commoditized and standardized, the difference between the winner and runner-up is usually micro-seconds.

It is debatable whether this can be called a skill. Irrespective, can this be automated /eaten away by AI? The contexts are different each time. Same decision taken in different contexts has vastly different results. The underlying parameters are many and are not same every time. Many a time, some of the defining parameters of the context are unknown or poorly known. Safe to assume that it is not easy for an algorithm to learn this.

As one moves from measuring efforts to results, it is not the hours/days that are spent tactically but the seconds when the right judgement is made, that matters. And that is a skill/attribute that is worth learning any day!