The jobs at the greatest risk of being replaced by technology are those that involve repetitive activities that can be performed in a relatively stable environment—or, in other words, that do not require the ability to perceive and adapt to subtle changes or to engage on an emotional level with other people. If you are in manufacturing, packing, construction, maintenance, agriculture, food service, cleaning services, or lawn care, for example, Frey and Osborne’s research could lead you to conclude that you should get training for a job that requires the perception of changing circumstances and corresponding physical motion and dexterity. Those are skills that you can hone, but which are still very hard for robots to do.

What are the safest jobs? Frey and Osborne predict that the low-risk jobs are in science, engineering, the arts, education, health care, law, and business management. What do those jobs have in common? Workers in those areas generally need high-level cognitive or emotional skills. They must know how to think critically and innovatively, and/or they need to have developed high levels of social and emotional intelligence. Those are skills that technology is not likely to master soon.

But the problem is that plenty of people haven’t mastered them, either. The past 25 years of research in neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics, and education have demonstrated that we are cognitively biased, lazy thinkers. As the sociologist and learning expert Jack Mezirow has said, “We have a strong tendency to reject ideas that fail to fit our preconceptions.” We are often emotionally defensive, inclined to protect our image of ourselves and our views of the world, which can lead to what Harvard professor Chris Argyris called “defensive reasoning.”