Skip to main content

The Future of the Professions - Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind ***

We're used to hearing how technology is going to replace the jobs of those doing mechanistic jobs - but this book takes on the impact that technology will have on the professions. 

I've only given the book three stars as it feels rather too much like a textbook (admittedly a well-written textbook), it's fairly repetitious and there's limited coverage of the science and technology behind the move. However this doesn't detract from the fascinating aspects of the book.

One of these is simply addressing the professions at all. According to the authors there's a fair amount of literature on this - but it's stuff us ordinary mortals are unlikely to have seen. A starting point is deciding just what the professions are. The book primarily focuses on the traditional professions such as medicine, accountancy, the law, journalism and religion - though they admit that the concept, essentially one where it is necessary to have specialist knowledge and there is often regulation and/or certification, is now a lot wider. (In practice, though religion gets passing mentions, it's largely sidelined, which is probably sensible in the context.)

The authors' assertion is that these roles can be subject to a kind of production line breakdown of tasks, some parts of which can easily be accommodated by information technology or less qualified individuals. The argument is that not only will this reduce costs where, for example, companies are reluctant to continue paying through the nose for corporate law (bye bye Suits), it also has the potential to open up these services to a much wider clientele that is presently largely excluded or at least has significantly reduced access.

Of course there are plenty of objections (often from those involved in the professions) which the authors largely succeed in knocking out of the way. For example they point out that this move will probably reduce the earnings of many professionals - but as they observe, these roles are not there for the benefit of the professionals but for their clients. Inevitably there is quite a lot of futurology style guesswork here. The authors point out they will often be wrong in detail - but argue convincingly that the professions are going to go through a major upheaval in the next generation.

It's amusing, given the authors' assertion that 'in the professions, knowledge resides in the heads of professionals, in books...', using this as a mark of how out of step the professions are in the internet age... that I should have been reading this in a book, rather than, say, a blog post or electronic magazine article. However this still remains a title of interest to anyone either involved in a profession (traditional or more modern) or interested in the future of the middle class.


Hardback:  

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...