The Future of the Professions

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Interesting that the "professions" of the title are far more than the legal professions, as I had thought

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"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" (1)

• I think this accords with my basic take: Lawyers are fundamentally information workers and the way we work with information in general is changing
  
• Not sure if "expertise" is the focus I'd choose. Tons of returns on unsophisticated information - maybe the Internet is good at making us all generalists
  

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Wild unsubstantiated claim that things are more or less the same in India or China (4) - the professions are cultural institutions far more than they are technical ones

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Very hard to define professionalism, maybe wrong-headed to try. But some broad "family resemblances" (Wittgenstein):

• Specialist knowledge
  
  • Including practical knowledge
    
  • Expectation of currency
    
  • Responsibility to increase profession's knowledge, generate and share new ideas
    
• Credentialism: Actual knowledge is to some extent irrelevant, have to prove it
  
• Regulation
  
  • Often granted exclusivity and autonomy
    
  • Expectation that work should comply with ethical codes
    
• Common set of values, binding over and above formal requirements
  

Not sure I agree with this definition completely. Really eliding class and status

• How do we distinguish a profession from a cartel?
  

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The "grand bargain": "In return for access to their extraordinary knowledge in matters of great human importance, society has granted them [professionals] a mandate for social control in their fields of specialization, a high degree of autonomy in their practice, and a license to determine who shall assume the mantle of professional authority."

• W: Barriers to entry are critical - expanding access weakens the profession's bargaining position
  
  • "[e]very bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret" (Weber, "Bureaucracy")
    

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Functionalist suggestions for roles of the professions:

• Correcting imbalance of knowledge
  
• Strengthening moral character of society
  
• Promoting social order and stability
  

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Whence exclusivity? (26)

• Natural consequence of economic progress?
  
• Elitism, classism, collective self-preservation
  
• Power move: Reaching for social monopoly at the same time (Magali Larson, The Rise of Professionalism)
  
  • "Conspiracy theorists": Professions as "conspiracies against the laity" (George Bernard Shaw)
    
• Marxist critique: If professional firms are to be profit-making enterprises, the client's needs necessarily cannot come first, and the grand bargain appears undermined
  

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Four major questions about professionalism today:

• Might there be new, better ways of organizing professional work, knowledge, and experience?
  
• Must all the work professionals currently do be done only by licensed experts?
  
• To what extent can we trust professionals to admit that their services could be delivered differently or by non-professionals?
  
• Is the grand bargain working? Are our professions fit for their social purpose? Some disconcerting problems:
  
  • Economic: People cannot afford professional services
    
  • Technological: Professional work rests on increasingly antiquated techniques
    
  • Psychological: Disempowering to have to outsource solving an important personal problem
    
  • Moral: Failing to provide access to important services
    
    • Technology "puts sins of omission as immediately and inevitably within our power as it puts sins of commission" (Anthony Kenny, What I Believe, 126)
      
  • Qualitative: Services provided are rarely world-class (necessarily, in face-to-face model)
    
  • Inscrutability: Difficult for clients to evaluate the quality or necessity of the services they receive
    

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What is the hole in the wall for the professions? What do the professions do? To what problem are the professions a solution? (38)

• KPMG's answer: "turn our knowledge into value for the benefit of our clients"
  
• "Stripped to its basics, whenever human beings seek the help of the professions, they do so because professionals know things that they do not."
  
  • I don't think I agree with this, particularly in law. Major benefit of getting a lawyer is getting the respect of the court, an ambassador to the culture
    

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"Practical expertise" (41):

• "Know-how"
  
• Expertise that has been repeatedly successfully applied
  
• Methods to apply expertise and experience
  
• Output of various technological systems
  
• Lay knowledge and experience
  
• Epistemological critique anticipated and largely glossed over, but seems important (41). Maybe that makes me a purist, but I'm certainly not as purist as a computer
  
  • Noted that division between the professions is a human construct, real problems are in between
    

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Biases that produce resistance to change:

• Status Quo Bias
  
• Irrational rejectionism, technological myopia, AI fallacy
  

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Lots of technical change across professions. Unclear how systemic these changes actually are - consider Margaret Hagan's note that there are lots of cool projects but little fundamental change

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Information from the past of the professions is, at this point, of little use in predicting their future

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End of the professional era: 4 trends:

• Move away from bespoke service
  
• Bypassing gatekeepers
  
• Proactive approach to professional work
  
• More-for-less challenge
  

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Automation is generally sustaining

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Automation vs innovation distinction appears spurious to me, just a matter of degree. Susskinds' favourite example of innovation is the ATM, which literally has "automated" in the name

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Emerging professional skills:

• New ways of communicating
  
  • I take exception to the equivalence drawn between email, texts, and social networks - major difference is that social networks are typically centralized and controlled by untrustworthy actors
    
  • Nonetheless I agree that much rejection of social media is "irrational rejectionism"
    
• Mastery of data
  
• New relationships with technology
  
  • Should become directly involved in development of expert systems
    
    • Darin Thompson would like this bit, I think
      
• Diversification: Work across traditional boundaries between disciplines
  

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Trends in standardization, moving from handcrafting to process:

• Routinization: SOPs which might or might not be executed by computers
  
• {Dis,Re}intermediation: Being removed from the supply chain and reinserting yourself elsewhere in it
  
• Decomposition
  

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New labour models:

• Labour arbitrage: Offshoring and outsourcing
  
• Para-professionalization and delegation
  
  • Often assisted by SOPs and technological assistance
    
• Flexible self-employment
  
• New specialists: Designers and engineers responsible for new systems
  
• User participation
  
• Machines
  

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More options for recipients (helping to satisfy latent demand):

• Online selection: Reputation systems, price-comparison systems, professional auctions
  
• Online self-help
  
• Personalization and mass customization
  
• Embedded knowledge
  
  • On rule-based computer systems: "failure to comply is simply not an option: it is neither meaningful nor possible" (131). Said without apparent concern. Is compliance an unmitigated good?
    
• Online collaboration
  

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"Information substructure": The "dominant means by which information is stored and communicated"

• Strong influence on how practical expertise is produced and distributed
  

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Currently in transitional period into "technology-based Internet society". When transition is complete, "quantity and complexity of materials will be hidden from users, new technologies themselves will help with their interpretation, and so traditional professionals will no longer be this dominant interface" (151)

• And who does the hiding? Who crafts the interpreting tools? I'm not saying this techno-utopian vision is impossible, but we are not on track for it right now
  

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• "We have already seen the power of social networking in overthrowing political regimes." (153): I don't think I agree. Has Egypt really changed all that much? Has Yemen, or Bahrain, or Qatar, or Saudi Arabia?
  
• We don't just automatically get the best world technically possible! this is a matter of politics, not technology
  

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• Moore's Law: Authors are apparently unaware that Moore's Law is slowing, approaching the atomic limits of MOSFET scaling with no clear alternatives on the horizon
  
• Metcalfe's Law: Technically correct, but society is not a technical system. Ask the users of Facebook if Facebook has gotten more useful to them as it's grown. You can't just take for granted that growth is beneficial!
  
• My basic complaint: "This is a transformation in the power of the tools available to professionals and those they help." (159): No it isn't! You're assuming that will happen, but it may very well not. You have no idea to what use this technology will be put, and the assumption that it will all be "progress" is unfounded. Seems to me so far technological advancement in this arena has just meant power moving away from labour toward capital. The only source of pessimism I can find in this book is that professionals may not be sufficiently enthusiastic about change; the idea that the change will be for the good of the public is taken for granted.
  

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Strikes me as a misreading of Zuboff (161), from what I understand of her work. I would think they should be quoting her more recent The Age of Surveillance Capitalism rather than a book from 1988.

• "her main insight is […] analysis of large bodies of data generated by our technologies can provide us with valuable new insights"
  
• This is not imo her main insight, rather asking who captures this new value. To whom are the insights valuable?
  

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Schmidt's claim that "we create as much information every two days as was created between the dawn of civilization until 2003" is simply false. It might be fair to say that we record that much more information in a form structured enough to be useful to machines, but that isn't nearly as impressive. This is a basic theoretical question the book doesn't really grapple with: What do you mean by information? Think about what this technology's blind spots are. Think about the spotlight effect and externalities. We don't record things we don't notice.

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Consider data as a liability

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"Imagine, for example, systems that can detect boredom, confusion, or frustration amongst a body of students." Imagine systems that can detect insufficient enthusiasm at the Trump rally and shine a spotlight on the dissenter. Think! Think about how society is changing: second-order effects on the professions will be more impactful than first.

• But, interesting: Imagine this technology deployed to assist negotiators
  

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Just lean on hardware rather than structuring knowledge. Very common - where have I read about this before?

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• Non-rival: Using knowledge does not leave less knowledge
  
• Non-excludable: Difficult to prevent people from using it or passing it on without paying
  
• "Shoulders of giants": Use of knowledge produces new knowledge
  
• Digitizable
  

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Who captures the value? Is it ethical to restrict access to potentially life-saving expertise if it could be freely distributed?

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"One clear exception": Would love to see some examples

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Not sure this is true. Thin clients and SaaS have been the trend for a while

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This seems like a good use for latent demand

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Love a little blind faith in capitalism

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• Traditional model
  
• Networked experts: Professionals congregate via online networks
  
  • Transitory affiliations for particular problems
    
  • Frequently competitive
    
  • Professionals available on demand
    
• Para-professionals: Providers with less training but additional systems/procedures
  
  • e.g. Nurse + Watson, junior teacher + Khan Academy
    
• Knowledge engineering: Practical expertise represented in a system made available to service recipients
  
• Communities of experience: Evolving bodies of practical experience are collaboratively sourced
  
  • e.g. Wikipedia, Linux
    
• Embedded knowledge: Expertise built into machines, systems, processes
  
  • e.g. Remotely monitored pacemaker
    
• Machine-generated expertise
  

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Not sure this is true, and if it is true, it isn't just (Hart, V.: Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data)

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Feel like they're dodging the hard questions here. Not sure what it is about these questions that puts them out of scope

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This seems kind of stupid - nobody wants a simulation of empathy. Even if this is true, it strikes me as more risk than potential. Machines that seem trustworthy but serve only their corporate masters are not something I want to exist.

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Of course, machines are not actually good at providing anonymity and privacy, as far as we've seen. Yet again we're talking about the potential of technology rather than the actuality

Overall response to this objection is quite weak, basically "yeah but it's worth it"

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Yes, exactly, its "score" - Watson can be said to be "better" at Jeopardy because of what a tightly bounded, quantified activity it is. Life is not like Jeopardy. There are no "scores" and I struggle to imagine a non-dystopian world where there are

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None of this is the point - this isn't what the value of empathy is. In most circumstances I accept the argument that outputs are more important than cognitive or affective states, but not here

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a term given by economists to the belief that there is some fixed quantity of reasonably-paid work

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Not the experience at the vanguard

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Tragedy of the commons

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