Objections and Anxieties

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.

Conclusion : What Future Should We Want?

In the long run, increasingly capable machines will transform the work of professionals, giving rise to new ways of sharing practical expertise in society. This is the central thesis of our book. We cannot commit to timeframes, in large part because the speed of change is not in our hands. But we are confident that the change will constitute an incremental transformation rather than an overnight revolution. In the language of the book, the shift itself can be characterized in many ways: as the industrialization and digitization of the professions; as the routinization and commoditization of professional work; as the disintermediation and demystification of professionals. Whatever terminology is preferred, we foresee that, in the end, the traditional professions will be dismantled, leaving most (but not all) professionals to be replaced by less expert people and high-performing systems. We expect new roles will arise, but we are unsure how long they will last, because these too, in due course, may be taken on by machines. In the post-professional society, we predict that practical expertise will be available online. Our strong inclination is to encourage the removal of current and future gatekeepers, and to provide people with as much access as is feasible to this collective knowledge and experience. The final step in our argument is to explain why we think that it is desirable to liberate practical expertise in this way. When we speak above and throughout about technology and its impact on the professions, we are conscious that it might sound as though we believe the future is already mapped out in detail and is somehow inevitable— that we are hardline ‘determinists’. Our analysis in Chapter 4, for example, makes it clear that we expect machines to become increasingly capable, that devices will be increasingly pervasive, and that human beings will be increasingly connected. And we certainly do anticipate an exponential growth in information technology. While we do not foresee these developments unfolding as a matter of necessity, we do regard them as extremely probable (barring asteroids, nuclear wars, pandemics, or the like). However—and this is where we part company with determinists—this does not mean that human beings have no control over future direction.

Information and Technology

In Part I of this book, by reporting on our own research and reflecting on the writings of others, we offer evidence of the changes that the professions are facing. In these opening chapters, however, we do not provide an explanation of why this transformation is taking place. That is our purpose now, in Part II of the book. Our aim is to provide a more general and systematic account of what is going on. We advance a variety of theories and models that explain the evidence we have uncovered and suggest how these may help us predict what is yet to unfold. Our initial focus in this chapter is on what we call the ‘information substructure’ of society, and how this influences the way that human beings have shared practical expertise in the past and are likely to do so in the future. Then we turn to technology, and talk about the worth of making predictions. Our conclusions here help us to identify what we regard as the four most important sets of future developments in technology. In concluding this chapter, we present a fifty-year overview of the changing impact of technology on the professions. This then sets us up for Chapter 5, where we discuss the nature of knowledge, the evolution of professional work, and the models for the production and distribution of practical expertise that will displace the traditional working practices of professionals. In everyday conversation, people often now use the terms ‘technology’ or ‘tech’ more often than ‘information technology’ and ‘IT’. This emphasis on the technical angle is understandable, because the technological accomplishments that underpin our everyday devices are remarkable. The technology can be mesmerizing, both in its power and design, and we justifiably marvel at the genius and ingenuity of those who contribute to its development. But to focus exclusively on the ‘T’ rather than on the ‘I’, to neglect the ‘information’ in our wonder at the ‘technology’, runs the risk of failing to grasp the role and value of information—in our world generally, and especially in the professions.

Patterns across the Professions

In the previous chapter we describe a wide range of developments across a diverse group of professions. One of our aims in this book is to make sense of the change that is taking place. We tackle this job in various ways. In Part II of the book we offer theoretical accounts of the flux. Before that, our project in this chapter is more practical—to identify patterns and trends that are shared across the professions. In teasing out these patterns and trends, we extend our analysis beyond the largely technological focus of the previous chapter. While we do address the broad implications of these technological advances, we also explore more general movements in professional work. We rely here on insights drawn from our interviews, research, and consulting work. From the last, we gained a sense of the daily preoccupations of the leaders of a sub-set of professional providers (most notably auditors, lawyers, tax advisers, and consultants), who organize themselves in ‘firms’. Some of the trends that we initially identify—relating, for example, to bespoke service, routinization, and decomposition—are given more rigorous treatment in Part II, where we develop a fuller theoretical account of the future of the professions. Accordingly, this chapter should be regarded as a bridge between our findings in the previous chapter and the theory in Part II. In Box 3.1 we summarize the eight broad patterns that we have observed and, for each of these, we pinpoint clusters of more granular trends. Some of these trends overlap and interrelate. We are not offering a taxonomy. At this stage we are instead trying to capture the main features of the flux. Although we advance these patterns and trends in respect of most professions, no individual profession currently displays the full set. Roughly speaking, each of the professions we studied seems to exhibit around half of the trends. It is our hypothesis that over the next decade or two each is likely to take on most of the rest.

From the Vanguard

In this chapter we change pace. We run through a group of different professions and offer a glimpse of the many ways in which they are changing, largely because of technology. The picture we present, although wide-ranging and varied, is not held out as comprehensive. It reflects activity only in particular parts of the world, predominantly the Anglo-American region, and at just one point in time—the middle of the second decade of the twenty- first century. In years to come, when we look back on the pages that follow, we will no doubt see, with the acuity of hindsight, that we missed some great case studies, that we included some which might better have been omitted, and that some of our exemplars no longer exist. This is to be expected. It would require many more volumes to carry out an exhaustive survey of technological change across the professions, and it would demand supernatural prescience to isolate the eventual winners. But to dwell on any particular case—success, failure, or omission—would be to misunderstand what we are trying to achieve in this chapter and through much of the book. To paraphrase the literary critic Harold Bloom, we are seeking to look beyond any particular ripple on the surface and, with a broad sweep through our chosen professions, to capture the deeper current of change that we sense is flowing below. In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, cardiologist and professor of genomics, anticipates that ‘[w]e are embarking on a time when each individual will have all their own medical data and the computing power to process it . . . from womb to tomb . . . even to prevent an illness before it happens’. There are many other commentators who are making predictions in this spirit. And the contrast with the current and long-established practice of medicine by doctors could not be starker. Traditionally, when people suspect something might be amiss with their health they book an appointment, they show up in person, they sit in one or more face-to-face interactions with individual experts, who in turn prescribe courses of action, often to be implemented by the patients once they leave.

After the Professions

When we started working on this book in 2010, our principal focus was on what the future might hold for the professions. In the course of our research and writing, however, we realized that to confine our attention to our current professions would, for two related reasons, be too limiting. In the first instance, when we gave thought to why we have the professions at all, and when we explored theories of the professions in trying to make sense of the work of professionals, we unearthed a more basic and important question that had to be answered: How do we share practical expertise in society? It became clear to us that ‘through the professions’ was only one answer to this question. In a print-based industrial society the professions have emerged as the standard solution to one shortcoming of human beings, namely, that we have ‘limited understanding’. When people need help in certain kinds of situation in life, those that call for specific types of specialist knowledge, then we naturally turn to professionals. But we cannot assume that this current answer is the only or best answer for all time. We should be alive to the possibility, as we move from a print-based industrial society into a technologybased Internet society, that there are alternatives. And we should also want to investigate these. Which leads to our second reason for concluding that our current professions are too limited an object of study. When we undertook our research at the vanguard, we found that technology and the Internet are not just improving old ways of working; they are also enabling us to bring about fundamental change. They are providing new ways to make practical expertise far more widely available. And so, what is coming over the horizon are not just better ways of handling the work within the current remit of the professions, but systems that are greatly extending our capacity to sort out problems that arise from insufficient access to practical expertise. In short, therefore, we concluded in the early stages of our work that to concentrate only on the future of the professions would be to let the tail wag the dog.

The Grand Bargain

There are two possible futures for the professions. The first is reassuringly familiar. It is a more efficient version of what we already have today. On this model, professionals continue working much as they have done since the middle of the nineteenth century, but they heavily standardize and systematize their routine activities. They streamline their old ways of working. The second future is a very different proposition. It involves a transformation in the way that the expertise of professionals is made available in society. The introduction of a wide range of increasingly capable systems will, in various ways, displace much of the work of traditional professionals. In the short and medium terms, these two futures will be realized in parallel. In the long run, the second future will dominate, we will find new and better ways to share expertise in society, and our professions will steadily be dismantled. That is the conclusion to which this book leads. The first step in our argument involves taking stock of the professions we currently have. We do this, in this opening chapter, to provide a foundation of solid thinking about the professions—about their purpose and common features, their strengths and weaknesses—upon which we build later. We start by sketching an informal portrait of today’s professions. We follow this with a more systematic attempt to explain which occupational groups belong to the professions and why. We then discuss the history of the professions and look at the ‘grand bargain’, the traditional arrangement that grants professionals both their special status and their monopolies over numerous areas of human activity. Next, we reflect on various theoretical accounts of the professions, which leads us to identify a series of fundamental problems with our professions as currently organized. We close with a call for a new mindset, and point to a series of biases that are likely to inhibit professionals from thinking freely about their future. To set off at an easy pace, we begin with a set of non-theoretical, everyday views about the professions. On reflection, most people would say that the professions are at the heart of our social and working lives.

Production and Distribution of Knowledge

We arrive now at the theoretical heart of the book. In Chapters 2 and 3 we describe how the professions are changing. In Chapter 4 we explain these changes by reference to the information substructure and developments in technology. In this chapter we draw these observations and arguments together. First we develop a model to show how professional work is evolving. Then, building on all we have said and done so far, we step away from the professions and describe the people and systems that will replace them in the future. In broad terms, our focus in this chapter is on the way that we handle a particular type of ‘knowledge’ in society. We are, of course, not alone in exploring this concept. All manner of scholars have applied their minds to ‘knowledge’ over the centuries. Philosophers, for example, who specialize in epistemology ask such fundamental questions as ‘what is knowledge?’ and ‘how can we know anything?’, or again, ‘of what knowledge can we be certain?’ Sociologists study the connections between knowledge and power, culture, and class. Lawyers handle questions about the ownership, protection, and sharing of knowledge. Information theorists consider the relationships between knowledge, information, and data. We are fascinated by each of these perspectives, but for the most part they fall beyond the scope of our work. Instead, the particular type of knowledge that is our preoccupation is what we introduce in Chapter 1 as ‘practical expertise’. Now we explore this concept in greater detail, looking at how we currently create and share it, and how we might handle it differently in the future. We seek to show, in economic terms, that knowledge has special characteristics that make its widespread and low-cost production and distribution both possible, and desirable, in a technology-based Internet society. Practical expertise, or our conception of it, is the knowledge that is required to solve the sort of problems for which the professions, traditionally, were the only solution—the knowledge that is used to sort out a health worry or resolve a tax problem, for example.

Introduction

This book is about the professions and the systems and people that will replace them. Our focus is on doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, tax advisers, management consultants, architects, journalists, and the clergy (amongst others), on the organizations in which they work, and the institutions that govern their conduct. Our main claim is that we are on the brink of a period of fundamental and irreversible change in the way that the expertise of these specialists is made available in society. Technology will be the main driver of this change. And, in the long run, we will neither need nor want professionals to work in the way that they did in the twentieth century and before. There is growing evidence that a transformation is already under way. More people signed up for Harvard’s online courses in a single year, for example, than have attended the actual university in its 377 years of existence. In the same spirit, there are a greater number of unique visits each month to the WebMD network, a collection of health websites, than to all the doctors working in the United States. In the legal world, three times as many disagreements each year amongst eBay traders are resolved using ‘online dispute resolution’ than there are lawsuits filed in the entire US court system. On its sixth birthday, the Huffington Post had more unique monthly visitors than the website of the New York Times, which is almost 164 years of age. The British tax authorities use a fraud-detection system that holds more data than the British Library (which has copies of every book ever published in the UK). In 2014 the US tax authorities received electronic tax returns from almost 48 million people who had used online tax preparation software rather than a tax professional to help them. At WikiHouse, an online community designed a house that could be ‘printed’ and assembled for less than £50,000 (built successfully in London during September 2014). The architectural firm Gramazio & Kohler used a group of autonomous flying robots to assemble a structure out of 1,500 bricks.