Quotes from Richard Susskind

If we leave it to professionals themselves to reinvent their workplace, are we asking the rabbits to guard the lettuce?

We are advancing into a post-professional society.

The deeper issue here is that any changes in the work that people do tend to originate at the level of particular tasks involved, and not with the job in general terms.

It is interesting to note, harking back again to the exponential growth of information technology, that the hardware on which Watson ran in 2011 was said to be about the size of the average bedroom. Today, we are told, it runs on a machine that is the size of three pizza boxes, and by the early 2020s Watson will sit comfortably in a smartphone.

People generally prefer problem-avoidance and problem-containment to problem-solving.

Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields—from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.9

Half of US doctors use the app known as Epocrates, a digital drug-reference resource that computerizes the task of finding out how different drugs interact. This task was once a time-consuming, often inconclusive piece of excavation from a 2,500-page drug-reference manual, known as the Physicians Desk Reference.

The Canadian science-fiction writer William Gibson could well have been speaking of technology in the professions when he said: '[t]he future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

To put this more concretely, we argue that professional work should be decomposed, that is, broken down into its constituent 'tasks'—

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.

The word 'robot', derived from the Czech word robota, meaning 'drudgery' or 'servitude', is of more recent origin, first used in 1921, in a play, R.U.R., by the Czech author Karel ?apek.

Knowledge, however, is non-rival.

The end of the professional era is characterized by four trends: the move from bespoke service; the bypassing of traditional gatekeepers; a shift from a reactive to a proactive approach to professional work; and the more-for-less challenge.

We also see intra-professional friction, when, for example, nurses take on work that used to be exclusive to doctors, or paralegals are engaged to perform tasks that formerly were the province of lawyers.

Instead, they have to build their own portfolios, made up of capabilities and competencies—being proficient at a range of particular tasks rather than at a specific job.

Industry and commerce are becoming increasingly complex, which means that there are more calls for professional help from lawyers, consultants, accountants, tax advisers, amongst others.

This is a new division of labour, and traditional professionals sometimes struggle here because they are no longer in the driving-seat.

Automation is what most professionals have in mind when they think of the relevance of technology for their disciplines.

This automation therefore complements but does not fundamentally change the central way in which services are delivered.

However, as Chapter 2 shows, there is a new generation of machine in action now, and these are systems (much more of which in Chapter 4) that can replace parts of, and sometimes all of, certain kinds of professional work.

Whereas automation is the use of technology to support this traditional model, innovation enables ways of making practical expertise available that simply were not possible (or even imaginable) without the systems in question.

There will be very few jobs for life, much less security, and very little predictability. There will be an emphasis instead on being able to learn, develop, and adapt rapidly as new roles and tasks arise. Different ways of communicating Not many decades ago professionals communicated in three ways—face-to-face, in writing, and by telephone. That was it.

Sending e-mails and texts is an automated version of writing letters, whereas social networking is an innovative technology, by which we mean, in this context, that it gives rise to ways of communicating that were not possible in the past.

More than this, however, professionals should become directly involved in the development of the systems that handle and deliver practical expertise.