Quotes About Progress

let's just get going, let's just get gone

Look back on the good, look forward to the future.

But people keep outgrowing their outgrowing

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Lighter laptops followed (our first one had a 10mb hard disk; today one of our laptops, at about one-third of the weight, has flash storage of 1 terabyte—100,000 times larger in thirty years).

As Voltaire would caution, in reforming or transforming the professions, we should not let the best be the enemy of the good.

Readers may call us radical, but if we can foresee a day when the average laptop has more processing power than all of humanity combined, then it might be time for professionals to revisit some of their current working practices.

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.

As late as 2000, Cukier and Mayer-Schönberger note, only 25 per cent of the world's stored information was in a digital form. Today that proportion is 98 per cent.5

there be different and better ways of producing knowledge and making it available in society, methods that might not directly involve the traditional professions at all?

Watson Doesn't Know It Won on "Jeopardy!

Mi llamada es a los jóvenes de espíritu, sin perjuicio de su edad" dijo una vez John F. Kennedy, y repito sus palabras en este momento. Escribo esencialmente para los jóvenes de espíritu, para los enérgicos, para los optimistas; para aquellos que convengan conmigo en reconocer que podemos y debemos modernizar (actualmente me gusta decir "mejorar") nuestro sistema jurídico y nuestro sistema de justicia. La

Mi llamada es a los jóvenes de espíritu, sin perjuicio de su edad" dijo una vez John F. Kennedy, y repito sus palabras en este momento. Escribo esencialmente para los jóvenes de espíritu, para los enérgicos, para los optimistas; para aquellos que convengan conmigo en reconocer que podemos y debemos modernizar (actualmente me gusta decir "mejorar") nuestro sistema jurídico y nuestro sistema de justicia.

todos los Abogados —salvo los que se retiren el día de hoy— son, en realidad, el Abogado del mañana.

Las instituciones tienden a intentar preservar el problema para el cual son la solución. CLAY SHIRKY

A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts." Ramana Maharshi

In 2010, half of Asian Americans 25 years old or older held bachelor's degrees, compared with 28 percent of the White population (Bureau of the Census 2011a).