We surface now from our theorizing in Part II to address more practical matters. Roughly speaking, the story so far is this—the professions are our current solution to a pervasive problem, namely, that none of us has sufficient specialist knowledge to allow us to cope with all the challenges that life throws at us. We have limited understanding, and so we turn to doctors, lawyers, teachers, architects, and other professionals because they have ‘practical expertise’ that we need to bring to bear in our daily lives. In a print-based industrial society, we have interposed the professions, as gatekeepers, between individuals and organizations and the knowledge and experience to which they need access. In the first two parts of the book we describe the changes taking place within the professions, and we develop various theories (largely technological and economic) that lead us to conclude that, in the future—in the fully fledged, technology-based Internet society—increasingly capable machines, autonomously or with non-specialist users, will take on many of the tasks that currently are the exclusive realm of the professions. While we do not anticipate an overnight, big-bang revolution, equally we do not expect a leisurely evolutionary progression into the post-professional society. Instead, we predict what we call an ‘incremental transformation’ in the way in which we organize and share expertise in society, a displacement of the traditional professions in a staggered series of steps and bounds. Although the change will come in increments, its eventual impact will be radical and pervasive. Our personal inclination, articulated at greater length in the Conclusion, is to be strongly sympathetic to this transformation. Our professions are creaking—they are increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible, and suffer from numerous other defects besides, as we describe in section 1.7. Change is long overdue. In conversation with mainstream professionals, in response to our thinking, two words in juxtaposition are uttered again and again—‘yes but . . . ’. Sometimes, what then follows is the special pleading that we note in section 1.9—professionals argue that our thinking applies to all professions other than their own.
The Importance of the Professional Society to the Future of Chemical Engineering
