By Richard Susskind & Daniel Susskind
Faced with the claim that artificial intelligence and robots are poised to replace them, most mainstream professionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants and others—believe they will emerge largely unscathed.
Our research challenges the idea that these professionals will be spared. We expect that within decades, most professionals will be replaced by less-expert people, new types of experts and high-performing systems.
The claim that the professions are immune to displacement by technology is usually based on two assumptions: that computers are incapable of exercising judgment, being creative or expressing empathy, and that these capabilities are indispensable in professional services.
The first problem with this position is empirical. As our research shows, when professional work is broken down into component parts, many of the tasks turn out to be routine and process-based. They don’t, in fact, call for judgment, creativity or empathy.
The second problem is conceptual. Insistence that the outcomes of professional advisers can only be achieved by sentient beings who are creative and empathetic usually rests on what we call the “AI fallacy”—the view that the only way to get machines to outperform the best human professionals is to copy how these professionals work. The error here is not recognizing that human professionals are already being outgunned by a combination of brute processing power, big data and remarkable algorithms.
When systems beat the best humans at difficult games, when they predict the likely decisions of courts more accurately than lawyers or when the probable outcomes of epidemics can be better gauged on the strength of past medical data than on medical science, we’re witnessing the work of high-performing, unthinking machines.
Our inclination is to be sympathetic to this transformative use of technology, not least because today’s professions are increasingly unaffordable, opaque and inefficient, and they fail to deliver value evenly across our communities. In most advanced economies, there is concern about the spiraling costs of health care, the lack of access to justice, the inadequacy of current education systems and the failure of auditors to recognize and stop various financial scandals. The professions need to change. Technology may force them to.
Richard Susskind is an informationtechnology adviser at the Oxford Internet Institute. Daniel Susskind is a fellow in economics at Balliol College, Oxford.