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WORK TITLE: The Future of the Professions
WORK NOTES: with Richard E. Susskind
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WEBSITE: http://www.danielsusskind.com/
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http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1614/2015939043-b.html * https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-susskind-68244829/ * https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/daniel-susskind
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Male.
EDUCATION:University of Oxford, B.A., M.Phil., D.Phil.
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Balliol College, University of Oxford, Oxford, England, Career Development Fellow in Economics. Has worked for British government as policy adviser in Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, policy analyst in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and senior policy adviser in the Cabinet Office.Harvard University, Kennedy Scholar.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Economist Daniel Susskind and his father, lawyer and professor Richard E. Susskind, explore how technology will affect lawyers doctors, teachers, accountants, and other professionals in The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts. These areas, they write, will be transformed by an automation of many routine tasks. “Even for the most prestigious professionals, when you break down their work into their component tasks, it transpires that many of those tasks can be done differently — either by other people using technology or by technology alone,” Daniel Susskind told David Dias in an interview for Canadian Lawyer‘s blog. The human professional will not be the gatekeeper of knowledge but rather the guide to sorting through the information that clients, patients, and students have obtained online, the authors predict. The human element will remain crucial in matters requiring empathy and moral judgment, they note, although they entertain the idea of a database of consumer psychological profiles that will let a professional know if the person is receptive to receiving negative news by automated means. They project a decline in employment opportunities for traditional professionals but a rise in demand for what they call “craftspersons,” who will perform a variety of support tasks in the technology-driven environment. Consumers, they write, will benefit from easier, cheaper access to information and services. “This debate is not about what’s best for you,” Richard Susskind said in a speech to professionals at University College London upon the book’s release, reported Pat Kane and Gilead Amit on New Scientist’s Web site. “It’s about what’s attractive for recipients.”
Several reviewers described the book as intriguing and thought-provoking, although some expressed concern about its implications. “The Future of the Professions helps us to recognise the professions’ current methods as convoluted, self-serving rituals designed to wrap simple tasks in mystique,” observed Giles Wilkes in Prospect Magazine. “Their practitioners do this to enjoy the same power over the rest of us that the first scribes exercised over the wondering illiterates around them. Better, surely, for everyone to learn how to read.” Jennifer Miller, writing at the online LSE Review of Books, found the Susskinds had made “an effectively constructed argument” for the benefits of greater access to information, but added: “The real question is whether the benefits outweigh the loss of the professions to creative destruction.” She also thought they should have given more consideration to privacy and security concerns. She allowed, however, that their book is “accessible to a broad audience yet theoretically grounded.” Kane and Abit saw much in the authors’ projected world that would appeal to consumers, but cautioned that “the debate we must have before it is too late should centre on where we place the moral boundaries.” Choice contributor A. Dantes deemed the work occasionally too broad, yet valuable, concluding that it “should be shared and discussed among students and all professionals in all different industries.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016, A. Dantes, review of The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, p. 1492.
Nature, November 12, 2015, Barbara Kiser, review of The Future of the Professions, p. 163.
Prospect Magazine, January, 2016, Giles Wilkes, “Are Only Poets Safe from Robots?”
ONLINE
Atlantic Speaker Bureau Web site, http://www.atlanticspeakerbureau.com/ (April 27, 2017), brief biography.
Balliol College, University of Oxford Web site, https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/ (April 27, 2017), brief biography.
Canadian Lawyer Web site, http://www.canadianlawyermag.com/ (March 31, 2016), David Dias, “Q&A: Richard and Daniel Susskind on the Future of Law.”
LSE Review of Books, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ (March 28, 2017), Jennifer Miller, review of The Future of the Professions.
New Scientist Web site, https://www.newscientist.com/ (November 3, 2015 ), Pat Kane and Gilead Amit, “Professionals, Your Time Is Up, Prepare to Be Sidelined by Tech.”*
Dr Daniel Susskind is a Fellow in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford University, where he teaches and researches. He is the co-author of the best-selling book, The Future of the Professions.
Previously he worked in the British Government – as a policy adviser in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, as a policy analyst in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and as a senior policy adviser in the Cabinet Office. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.
Dr Daniel Susskind
BA MPhil DPhil Oxf
Career Development Fellow in Economics
Academic subject:
Economics
Research interests: Daniel’s main interest is in the impact of technology, particularly artificial intelligence, on economics. His research focuses on the consequences of technology on earnings and employment. He co-authored The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Before returning to Balliol, Daniel worked for the British Government – in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and as a Senior Policy Adviser at the Cabinet Office. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.
Daniel Susskind is a Lecturer in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he teaches and researches, and from where he has two degrees in economics. Previously, he worked for the British Government—in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and as a Senior Policy Adviser at the Cabinet Office. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.
Best known for:
Daniel Susskind is best known for being an economist and Fellow in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford.
Summary:
Daniel Susskind is Fellow in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he teaches and researches. He worked for the British Government in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and also as a Senior Policy Adviser at the Cabinet Office. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.
Biography:
Daniel Susskind is Fellow in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford.
He has worked for the British Government - in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street and as a Senior Policy Adviser at the Cabinet Office. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.
Daniel Susskind co-authored The Future of the Professions with Professor Richard Susskind which explains how "increasingly capable systems" - from telepresence to artifical intelligence - will bring fundamental change in the way that the expertise of specialists is made available in society. In an Internet society, they argue, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others, to work as they did in the 20th century.
Based on the authors' in-depth research of more than ten professions and illustrated by numerous examples this book assesses and questions the relevance of the professions in the 21st century.
Daniel has addressed global audiences at C-Level and strategic management levels both here in the UK, USA, South America and Europe and regularly invited to write and comment in the broadsheets and journals.
Publications: The Future of the Professions - Hardback 2015, Paperback 2017
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Q&A: Richard and Daniel Susskind on the future of law
Written by David Dias Thursday, 31 March 2016
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Richard Susskind, one of the legal industry’s leading prognosticators, was in Toronto yesterday promoting his new book, The Future of the Professions. It prophesies a massive technological disruption in how expertise, legal and otherwise, is delivered.
Daniel and Richard Susskind were in Toronto yesterday promoting his new book, The Future of the Professions. (Photo: David Dias)
Daniel and Richard Susskind were in Toronto yesterday promoting his new book, The Future of the Professions. (Photo: David Dias)
Susskind’s 2008 bestseller, The End of Lawyers?, sparked furious debate within the profession by suggesting that advanced systems could replace much of the work held to be within the exclusive domain of lawyers.
This time, he and his son Daniel — himself: a senior adviser to the British government and an economist of some renown — are taking a broader look at the professions. The co-authors sat down with Legal Feeds before the book launch to talk about what the future holds for lawyers as advanced computer systems and artificial intelligence become a reality.
Legal Feeds: Why should lawyers care about how different professions — teachers, accountants, and doctors — are using technology?
Richard: What’s happening in law is happening right across the professions, and we can actually look at other professions and learn about what’s likely to happen in law — not least because law is more conservative than other professions, so we’ve got insight that we can gain from all of them . . . because they face the same challenges and because they’re a few years ahead.
LF: Does that mean that these other professions can give lawyer a glimpse into what their future holds?
Richard: By and large, I think it’s fair to say the legal profession is at the back of the professional groups in terms of uptake. But there’s nothing inherent in the nature of legal work that means that what’s happening in other professions shouldn’t also happen in law. . . . The major accounting firms are probably a decade ahead in some of their uses of technology. And while they weren’t competitors, that might not have been an issue, but they’re now direct competitors.
LF: Will analyzing the technological evolution of these other professions give law firms the potential to avoid some of the turmoil?
Richard: I think if you’re wanting to give your readers the hope of a soft landing, I think that would be to mislead them. . . . The looming nightmare, I suppose, for traditional lawyers is that an Amazon in law comes along and does to law what Amazon did to bookselling. My gut tells me it’s unlikely to unfold in as simple a way as that because the market is far more complex . . . but we should expect that large parts of legal practice will be done very differently, and that these new techniques are unlikely to come from the mainstream traditional providers.
LF: So who are likely to lose their jobs? Secretaries? Paralegals? Associates?
Daniel: One of the unhelpful things we do when we talk about the future of work is, we tend to talk about jobs. So we talk about traditional lawyers, legal secretaries, things of that sort. Why is that unhelpful? Because it encourages us to think of the work that professionals do as monolithic indivisible lumps of stuff, whereas in actual fact when you take any professional’s job and look under the bonnet, they perform lots of different tasks, lots of different activities in their job.
LF: But certainly some of those activities can be done by a computer and some can’t, right?
Daniel: Even for the most prestigious professionals, when you break down their work into their component tasks, it transpires that many of those tasks can be done differently — either by other people using technology or by technology alone. And this task-based approach, trying to recognize that professional work isn’t a lump of stuff of a given difficulty, and instead is composed of lots of different activities and tasks is I think quite an important thing to do.
Richard: I think it’s pretty fair to say that a lot of the work of paralegals, a lot of the work of fairly junior lawyers, if you look at things like document review, that machines are now in some of the tasks they undertake outperforming them. But if because you’re a senior associate you think you’re safe, I think that would be a false level of comfort. . . . One’s career prospects we believe depends on one’s adaptability. If you think you’re going to carry on doing the work that an associate has always done, I think you’re going to be disappointed.
LF: What’s timeline for this, 10 years, 20, 30?
Richard: In the book we expressly say we are not pinning ourselves down to dates. . . . But we reckon that the ’20s is going to [be about] redeployment rather than unemployment, by which we mean, there’s a whole lot of new roles one needs to take on, a lot based on technology. Whether it be the knowledge engineer, the systems designer . . . but once one gets into the ’30s and ’40s, one can predict a more fundamental decline of the traditional professions.
Daniel: It’s not the case that people are going to wake up tomorrow and find an algorithm sitting there and your job has been replaced by a robot. What we’ll see is tasks here and tasks there — a gradual change driven by technology. A relentless change but a gradual change.
LF: Do you think the law societies will stand in the way of this change? There has to be some kind of professional regulation, doesn’t there?
Richard: Do I think, though, that the professional bodies are likely to be major obstacles to some of this change? I think, for the general population, the answer is yes. . . . But it’s not professions or free-for-all. We can have other providers in the game, but being regulated in different ways. But, again, we want a task-based approach to this. Some tasks are so crucial that they require deep expertise and they require maximum client protection. Others are fairly routine and repetitive, and we think that, although they still need to be regulated to some extent, you don’t need the same severity of regime.
LF: What do law firms need to be doing right now to prepare for the new reality?
Richard: Often what lawyers want is what I call “off-the-shelf: competitive advantage.” They want to know what’s the answer really. But it’s really about thinking more fundamentally about issues such as market opportunity, differentiation, competitive advantage, all these notions that sound for most lawyers, I’m afraid, like management jargon — but they have very important applications. For the first time ever, law firms need to be able to engage in long- and short-term strategic planning. . . . As a firm, you need to allocate a group who think deeply about the way the market’s changing, the opportunities and threats that that throws up for you. You need to identify the markets you think you can have a sustainable offering in. You need to think about the ways you’re going to compete.
The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
Barbara Kiser
527.7577 (Nov. 12, 2015): p163.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Nature Publishing Group
http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind Oxford University Press (2015)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Advances in digitization will soon obviate the need for doctors, teachers and lawyers. So write 'legal futurist' Richard Susskind and economist Daniel Susskind, arguing that the professions are unaffordable, antiquated and opaque. Analysing how the algorithmic juggernaut is forcing the decomposition of traditional careers, the authors propose six new professional models--such as "knowledge engineers"--that together form a non-alarmist vision of how "increasingly capable" machines could help to redistribute expertise.
Kiser, Barbara
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kiser, Barbara. "The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts." Nature, vol. 527, no. 7577, 2015, p. 163. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA434515537&it=r&asid=bf39e412093f0ceec837a25ffa66e4ef. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A434515537
Susskind, Richard: The future of the professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts
A. Dantes
53.10 (June 2016): p1492.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Susskind, Richard. The future of the professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts, by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind. Oxford, 2016. 346p bibl index ISBN 9780198713395 cloth, $29.95; ISBN 9780191022401 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-4357
QA76
MARC
This book thoughtfully explores the future of professional work and the people who do it. The proclamations that certain professions are dead or dying because of the increasing prevalence of technology have been many and varied. But Richard Susskind, consultant and author, e.g., Tomorrow's Lawyers (2013) and The Future of Law (CH, Jun'97, 34-5916), and Daniel Susskind (economics, Balliol College, Univ. of Oxford, UK) do a good job uniting all the professions and the idea of professionalism under one banner, and they explore what technology has in store for the future of all of them. What the book does best is present the case that professionals should turn inward and examine the true value of their expertise. By defining the underlying assumptions that connect all professions and systematically deconstructing their worth to society at large, the authors craft an intriguing look at a future where professional work is more accessible to the masses and perhaps less valuable. Though it is too broad and unspecific at times, ultimately this book should be shared and discussed among students and all professionals in all different industries. Summing Up: ** Recommended. All library collections.--A. Dantes, Florida International University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dantes, A. "Susskind, Richard: The future of the professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1492. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942768&it=r&asid=e07de3a25cb39d43dd9a0a5073573548. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942768
Are only poets safe from robots?
Could lawyers and doctors soon be replaced by robots?
by Giles Wilkes / December 10, 2015 / Leave a comment
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Published in January 2016 issue of Prospect Magazine
The iCub humanoid robot at IDSIA's robotics lab in Switzerland ©Juxi
The iCub humanoid robot at IDSIA’s robotics lab in Switzerland ©Juxi
The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts, by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, Oxford University Press, £18.99
Four years ago, a poem called “For the Bristle- cone Snag” found its way into the Archive, a student magazine published at Duke University in the United States. Containing the less-than-immortal lines, “They attacked it with mechanical horns because they love you, love, in fire and wind,” the nine-line stanza appears to muse on the destruction of a tree. There is a reason for the poem’s clumsiness: it was written by a computer algorithm, created by an undergraduate curious to see how artificial intelligence could create something as inherently human as poetry.
On the evidence of “For the Bristlecone Snag” it is too soon to predict when the TS Eliot Prize will be won by a robot. But elsewhere, few occupations can rest easy. Resistance is not so much futile as economically bad form. Ever since the Luddite machine-breaking rebellion 200 years ago, a key part of every economist’s training has been to learn to scoff at technophobes. Machine efficiency allows resources to go further so what does it matter if workers are displaced? An evolving economy generates new uses for their labour, usually tasks that are less grimy and repetitive than before. Of course it is better to be the person who invents or owns the machine than a worker who suddenly finds he or she is surplus to requirements. But these distributional trembles should be dealt with by the political class, not economists.
As miners have been replaced by coal-cutting machines and bank clerks by computerised ledgers, this complacency has held firm. But the latest, information-centred, phase of industrial revolution has a more unnerving character. The replacement of human labour by machines was supposed to hit a limit. At some point, routine tasks such as scanning warehouse inventory evolve into the less routine, such as deciding a marketing strategy or designing an undergraduate course. Beyond this limit, there is meant to be a space where mankind’s skills remain irreplaceable, securely remunerated and with the humans still firmly in charge.
But perhaps not. That is the most dramatic argument one might take from The Future of the Professions by Richard and Daniel Susskind, a father and son team. Their view is that what once hit cloth weavers and miners, and is now happening to cashiers and travel agents, will eventually sweep up the advanced professions. The traditional ways of working currently enjoyed by lawyers and doctors will be broken and revolutionised. This will happen through the encroachment of open IT systems and ever more capable artificial intelligence, able to make the sort of fine judgements—including those with a moral angle—that currently rely on experienced human beings.
Read more:
Is technology set to steal your job?
Capital punishment: why new technologies are hurting us (for now)
This is a bold book, not least because of its target. Despite 30 years of the information revolution, trades such as law, medicine and accountancy have remained well beyond the grasp of ordinary people, and protected from the market forces wearing away at many other industries. Contrast this with a more thoroughly disrupted industry, the media, which has seen explosive growth in consumer choice. Why should any vocation have a protective wall thrown around it? More than an audacious stab at futurology, this makes the authors’s argument an act of delicious iconoclasm.
Many will find this hard to swallow. Law, medicine, architecture and education are built on human expertise. They demand years of training and require a level of trust that can only exist between human beings. For a medical diagnosis or legal opinion one needs not just data processing but judgement, empathy and imagination. Those who reach the peak of their profession correspond to Arthur Schopenhauer’s definition of genius: not merely hitting the mark that others cannot hit, but hitting one that no one else can see.
“Eighteen years have passed since Deep Blue, an IBM computer, beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Now Kasparov would struggle to beat your iPhone”
Law, accountancy and medicine also enjoy a level of social influence that cannot be explained merely by an appreciation of their skill. Most have evolved as closed shops, demanding specific learning and credentials. The economist would describe this in terms of monopoly power: leading lawyers, consultants and accountants are richly rewarded for their scarcity. The Susskinds put it more grandly: “The professions are at the heart of our social and working lives… Their practitioners save our lives and keep us in good health, they educate our children, counsel and enlighten us spiritually, advise us on our legal entitlements, manage our money, assist us in running our businesses, help us complete our tax returns, design our homes, and much more.”
I find two strong claims of the authors easy to believe, and a third that still awaits proof. The first is that the relentless onward march of information technology is bound to result in computer systems with abilities that rival or even exceed those of advanced professionals—although the authors wisely do not put a date on this. The second is that this is clearly desirable and good for welfare. But whether this should happen just because it can is another matter altogether.
Technological improvement is theoretically limitless. Eighteen years have passed since Deep Blue, an IBM computer, beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Since then, as Moore’s law has predicted, computer processing power has doubled every 18 months; now Kasparov would struggle to beat your iPhone. Four years ago, IBM’s Watson beat two of the greatest champions ever to play Jeopardy!, an American television game show demanding erudition and lateral thinking. Watson’s method was brutal: load up terabytes of unstructured data, apply probabilistic algorithms and spit out an answer. If this is what could be achieved in 2011, it is easy to foresee a time when, as the Susskinds put it, “future systems could articulate and balance moral arguments, identify consistencies and illogicalities, point out assumptions and presuppositions… and identify conclusions.”
The human brain is still the most complicated structure in the universe, each of its 80bn neurons connected to 10,000 others. A typical objection is that zeros and ones can never realise human-like thought. But computerising professional work does not demand a silicon version of a human professional. In the words of one journalist, Watson won its game without “knowing” that it won.
Finding new solutions to problems is a neat summary of what technological progress means. That such progress benefits us is the reason to welcome this next stage of disruption. Superficially, professionals appear willing to buy into the information revolution and the tools it has brought. Lawyers accept emailed documents and court appearances by video link. Higher education is being revolutionised by online learning through massive open courses.
But it is too early to extrapolate such improvements into a future in which the machines take over the decision-making role of humans. As a feat of futurology, this book could have benefited from a more sceptical take on how monopolies evolve to shield themselves from the forces that threaten them. The Susskinds set out a model for the evolution of professional work in which the last stage is “externalisation,” where the deep practical knowledge of the professions is released to the commons. Knowledge wants to be free, and market forces will drive it that way. Yet, as they acknowledge, professions also show a profound reluctance to share. This is understandable. A legal firm does not spend years accumulating an understanding of specialist law only to give it away.
As the authors themselves observe, professions do not only compute and evaluate, but also take moral responsibility: “We want another human being to have reflected, and perhaps agonised, over decisions and advice that matter to us.” But this responsibility brings the possibility of power, which can be used to resist certain ways of working. Consulting a gigantic database of legal documentation may come cheap. Generating an opinion will not.
Also, by attempting to sweep up all the professions into one view the authors lose the ability to distinguish between how each of them might respond to the challenge and opportunity. Accountancy, law and medicine are not only technologically different, but enjoy differential access to market and state power. The weavers and spinners displaced 200 years ago had little choice in the matter. Other products resist this, and some forms of professional service will pull off this trick better than others. Lawyers are to some extent responsible for the rules they follow, whereas medics and architects need to master the laws of physics and biology, which can presumably be grasped by super-advanced machines.
The Future of the Professions is not an easy read. For a work produced by two real humans, it is strangely bloodless in style, enumerating positions and counter-positions like medieval scholastics debating the divine. Sometimes I wished there was a machine to read the book for me.
But this dry argumentation does nothing to detract from the audacity of their thesis. The Future of the Professions helps us to recognise the professions’ current methods as convoluted, self-serving rituals designed to wrap simple tasks in mystique. Their practitioners do this to enjoy the same power over the rest of us that the first scribes exercised over the wondering illiterates around them. Better, surely, for everyone to learn how to read.
Professionals, your time is up, prepare to be sidelined by tech
A new book, The Future of the Professions, argues that machines will soon do the work of lawyers, doctor and others. Should babies be delivered by robots?
Professionals, your time is up, prepare to be sidelined by tech
By Pat Kane and Gilead Amit
“Computer says ‘no’.” Let’s hand it to the BBC’s cult comedy Little Britain and its grumpy creation Carol Beer, who was fond of quoting computer “judgements” on matters she could easily have decided on herself. With cruel precision, it laid bare our cultural nerve ends about the dangers of too much automation in the expert services we seek.
We would struggle to call Carol Beer a “professional” in the same vein as the ones Richard and Daniel Susskind discuss in their new book The Future of the Professions. But empathy – the capacity to read another human sensitively, the root of our moral compass – is one of the few aspects of professional roles the Susskinds imagine might survive “incremental transformation” by information technology.
Brought together, the Susskinds (Richard the father and Daniel the son) are particularly well placed to comment. Daniel, currently lecturing in economics at Balliol College at the University of Oxford and Richard, a recent Cabinet advisor, bring a first-principles (and historical) approach to the question of why we need professionals in the first place.
Faced with legal issues, health challenges, educational needs, financial complexities, and the building and engineering of their environment, the citizens of the Middle Ages couldn’t possibly know what was required to make informed decisions. The professions – lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, engineers and so on – emerged to answer this need, with what the Susskinds stress is their common offer: “practical expertise”.
Today, information networks are providing access to such expertise while radically bypassing the professional gatekeeper, in ways that make clients feel more personally empowered.
Thus we turn up at our doctor’s with more web-collated information on our persistent leg wound than a field paramedic. If search engines struggle to turn up the answers we seek, we find the solution ourselves in a jungle of user forums where we interpret and judge the practical opinions of others. This amounts to the devolution of a classic professional competence.
And if all this cyber-centricity puts irreparable strain on our relationships, we can kick off divorce proceedings by formulating the relevant legal documents online – completing the routine tasks with what might be, under the circumstances, a welcome impersonality.
Dispute resolution
Already eBay’s software resolves 60 million disputes per year without the involvement of a single lawyer – more than 40 times the number of civil cases registered annually in the courts of England and Wales.
And more students sign up for Harvard’s online courses in a single year than have ever attended its Massachusetts campus. The Vatican has even launched an official app to help sinners prepare for confession (though with the usual proviso that it is no substitute for the real thing).
“This debate is not about what’s best for you,” Richard Susskind warned an increasingly agitated audience of professionals at University College London’s Kennedy Theatre last week, at an event to mark the book’s release. “It’s about what’s attractive for recipients.”
By the time the distinguished panel assembled for the event was due to speak, the mood resembled that of the proverbial turkey farm recently privy to the true significance of Christmas. But the panellists’ confidence in the uniqueness of their individual cases was undimmed.
Michael Briggs, a judge in the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, welcomed the efficiency that machines could bring to the legal profession, but stressed that clients would never choose a smart computer program over a lawyer with moral principles at heart. And David Lomas, who leads UCL’s School of Medical and Life Sciences, asserted with equal confidence that machines could never match the relationship of trust patients require from their physicians.
Given the increasingly high costs of accessing legal assistance and the unavoidably high false diagnosis rates among doctors, one cannot help but wonder whether the public truly shares the concerns over technology that some so readily attribute to them.
As the professionals in the audience piled in with increasingly frantic justifications of their own indispensability, the authors’ frustration was palpable. When one doctor took to the floor to say that machines would never be able to deliver babies, Richard Susskind cut in to explain it was no longer a question of whether they could encroach into such sensitive areas, but whether or not they should.
Moral boundaries
Instead, the debate we must have before it is too late should centre on where we place the moral boundaries. Should a robot judge ever be given authority to pass a death sentence, or a digital physician advise a family on when to pull the plug on their relative’s life support system?
The unusually patient explanations in The Future of The Professions give a sense of the official pushback the authors have encountered. Richard Susskind recalls being censured by the UK Law Society for “bringing the legal profession into disrepute”. His crime? A mid-1980s prediction that email would become a natural medium for lawyer-client relations.
As creator of the world’s first commercially available “expert” legal software in 1988, the elder Susskind loves the current renaissance of applied AI. In a world where a new medical paper is published every 41 seconds, the vast data-crunching of “learning-machines” such as IBM’s Watson or Google’s DeepMind could not just provide a safety check for the judgements of human professionals, but also make fresh diagnoses.
The Susskinds foresee the professions “decomposed” into their various tasks and scattered across new divisions of labour like “process analysts”, “knowledge engineers” and “system providers”. “Quasi-trust” is all that would be required for open networks of expertise shaped by reputation and ratings to flourish: think eBay, Airbnb or Uber.
In this new compact of digital access, DIY enthusiasm and ever-smarter machines, human professionals are no longer the “sage on the stage” but the “guide on the side”. No doubt the traditional credentialing (and occupational ego) of the lawyer, doctor or teacher will have to change.
The writers leave a meaty role for “craftspersons” – those professionals whose rare talent and sensibility can still surpass the capabilities of the coming matrix – though in a scenario where AI is embedded throughout our social exchanges, it’s hard to see how they’ll be anything other than relics.
If she took empathy classes, Carol Beer could still draw a para-professional wage in the coming years. But she might also have to hear what her devices are actually telling her. “Computer says: ‘Shall we?'”
Image credit: Floris Leeuwenberg/The Cover Story/Corbis
The Future of the Professions: How technology will transform the work of human experts
Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Oxford University Press
Book Review: The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/02/02/book-review-the-future-of-the-professions-how-technology-will-transform-the-work-of-human-experts-by-richard-and-daniel-susskind/
2/2/2016
In The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind give a descriptive, predictive and normative argument for the impending dissolution of our professional institutions in their current state. Although she questions the decision to leave issues of privacy, confidentiality and online security unexamined, Jennifer Miller positions this book as an accessible and theoretically grounded account of why professional work can, will and must change.
If you are interested in this review, you may also like to listen to a podcast of Richard and Daniel Susskind’s lecture at LSE, held on 30 November 2015.
The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts. Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind. Oxford University Press. 2015.
Future of ProfessionsWe’ve grown accustomed to the decaying hulls of factories and abandoned shopping centres. We’ve begun to see the hollowing out of suburban office parks and we can even envision being transported by fleets of robot taxis. Yet we are working, studying and legislating as though our schools, courts and hospitals will continue as hubs of economic activity abuzz with an app-enabled but largely unchanged cadre of educators, lawyers and doctors. Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind provide a descriptive, predictive and normative account of why our professional institutions will not, and should not, endure. The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts deserves to be widely read because society, and professionals in particular, are operating with limited vision and flawed assumptions about the future of professional work.
Richard Susskind’s extensive career advising business and government at the highest levels, including as IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, has focused on the future of the legal profession (see The Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services and Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future). His own background is in law, a field in which he holds professorships at University College London and at the University of Strathclyde.
His legal background and previous works inform the coverage of law in Chapter Two, which examines the cutting-edge of current practice and predicts future directions. For the legal profession, the authors describe recent innovations in practice like online dispute resolution, virtual courts and the automated preparation of legal documents. They predict that deregulation, disaggregation of legal tasks and the embedding of legal compliance within systems and structures will further transform today’s costly and inscrutable legal system.
They describe disruptive innovation in education and health, two professions that have attracted a great deal of speculation already (see, for instance, Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in your Hands; Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere; and Will Richardson, Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information are Everywhere). More surprisingly, they describe radical technical change in the work of the clergy, tax advisers, management consultants and architects. In each case they find that technology will make expertise much more accessible to consumers and leave a small role for human experts. Of the major professions, only engineering was not included.
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Not everyone is convinced. In Chapter Six the authors counter several anxieties and objections to their future vision of the professions, applying the logic of cost-benefit analysis. They emphasise how lowering the cost of expert advice will extend its benefits throughout society. They then use the benefits of increased access to refute a series of counterarguments in turn – what about the loss of craft? The preference for human interaction? The need for empathy? It is an effectively constructed argument, as the benefits of wider access probably do outweigh any single one of these costs. Yet the real question is whether the benefits outweigh the loss of the professions to creative destruction.
This book explicitly does not address ‘privacy, confidentiality, security, and liability’ or ‘the dark side of the Internet’. While it may have been impossible to address these topics thoroughly within the scope of this already ambitious book, I think the authors went too far in setting them completely aside. With a new data breach in the news every week and the increasing engagement of state actors, it is clear that our IT infrastructure operates in a hostile environment. For example, if a nation’s medical diagnostic expertise is concentrated in an expert system rather than dispersed among human experts, it is vulnerable to system outages and covert manipulation.
The risks aren’t limited to cybersecurity. The authors envision a model where most professional advice is available free to users. Yet free information is not a bar to profiteering. As the saying goes, ‘if you are not paying for the product, you are the product’. When the authors suggest that the problem of empathy in delivering bad news could be countered through an algorithm using consumers’ ‘psychological and emotional profiles’, they seem untroubled by the prospect of such profiles taking their place alongside credit reports and criminal background checks in the business environment. Given Richard Susskind’s legal background, it’s surprising that liability, and accountability more generally, are set aside.
One area where the professions have arguably been successful is as a pathway to good work: work that is stable, well-compensated, intellectually engaging and often motivated by values beyond the market. The authors unambiguously predict ‘a decline in demand for the traditional professions and the conventional professional worker’. However, they do foresee a variety of new and emerging roles with the potential to provide good work: para-professionals, craftspeople, process analysts, system engineers and even specialist ‘empathizers’. These proposed future roles are another place where neglecting security issues leaves the book incomplete. There might well be future roles for white-hat hackers, personal data guardians, privacy officers and other security workers.
In a book that is accessible to a broad audience yet theoretically grounded, the authors approach professions as the result of a grand bargain to address specific properties of specialist knowledge. They find this grand bargain with the professions now failing ‘economically, technologically, psychologically, morally, qualitatively, and in terms of their inscrutability’. Technology offers alternatives that will displace much of the current professional workforce. Susskind and Susskind argue that we can, will and in fact do face a moral obligation to transform our institutions for access to expert knowledge.
Jennifer Miller is an Assistant Professor (Teaching) at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. She received her doctorate in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests focus on the intersection between science and technology policy and the future of work. She has also written about collaboration among universities, industry and government in university research centres. Before pursuing her doctorate, she worked for IBM in human resources. Read more reviews by Jennifer Miller.