The Future of the Professions

Establishes the grand bargain

Professional bodies give access to many domains of knowledge that it is impractical for a single human to try and master. 

In each of these domains, the professional body will:

• credential those that it believes have understood the body of knowledge, 

• evolve the body of knowledge over time

Explains the industrialization on knowledge industries.

While the authors present the industrialization of the professions as unique, what is presented seems very familiar in a move from crafts to extract patterns and procedures to enable production at greater scale.  

The authors point out that the given the inexhaustible nature of expertise, the credentialling of new adherents has to be controlled to protect prices.  This completes the grand bargain.  Given the broader availability of expertise through technology, this bargain is disrupted.

Explains the process of mechanization causing displacement of humans from the process.

This book was written in the time when IBM's Watson was the dominant form of an AI in the world.  The authors muse about whether the new products and services that emerge as a by-product of this automation, will themselves be better performed by humans or machines.  I think if they had written this book in more modern times, their outlook would be darker. 

Explains the work for which humans will be needed the longest

There was a fascinating list of jobs that were thought to be difficult to automate.  Some of them might have been obvious like Data scientists and Systems engineers, but other much less so: Empathizers, Moderators.  They pointed out that in a situation where a brilliant surgeon has to deliver bad news to a patient, the empathetic delivery of bad news, is in and of itself a skill that might be much harder to automate than movement of the scalpel.  However, I have personally been astounded by the subtlety and nuance of deeply human questions that I have put to ChatGPT.   Craftspeople also made the list, acknowledging that human dexterity, adaptability and mobility will be needed for quite some time. 

Explains the outcomes for the end state

The authors conclude that there are 2 end states, 1 where the knowledge that is currently in the professions is in the commons.  I see this in the UK's approach to information security, where experts share knowledge freely.  The other is where the collected knowledge is a paid service on the internet.  To some degree the whole "Cloud" phenomenon is that, where IT Operations skills are available to the laity through AWS or Azure. 

What it does not do 

Explain how the income distribution works.

What I think  is missing is any explanation of how people displaced from the marketplace for their expertise, participate in the economy.  How are goods and services distributed.  This was well explored in Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, but his timeframe seemed far in the future, where as Messrs Susskind present this as an upcoming reality.

Explain the model for accountability

Another area that seemed poorly explored was human accountability.   With expertise on the commons, what is the model for holding anybody to account when you use it? It seems that there will still be a market for those willing to be accountable for expertise they have marshalled for a client, but this model did not seem to be examined. 

Next Readings 

The book is meticulously researched.  Footnotes abound.  However 2 books lept at me and I am searching them out for further reading.

• Erik Brynjolfsson The second Machine Age

• John Rawl’s Theory of Justice