A new book, The Future of the Professions , argues that machines will soon do the work of lawyers, doctor and others. Should babies be delivered by robots?

“Computer says ‘no’.” Let’s hand it to the BBC’s cult comedy Little Britain and its grumpy creation Carol Beer, who was fond of quoting computer “judgements” on matters she could easily have decided on herself. With cruel precision, it laid bare our cultural nerve ends about the dangers of too much automation in the expert services we seek.

We would struggle to call Carol Beer a “professional” in the same vein as the ones Richard and Daniel Susskind discuss in their new book The Future of the Professions. But empathy – the capacity to read another human sensitively, the root of our moral compass – is one of the few aspects of professional roles the Susskinds imagine might survive “incremental transformation” by information technology.

Brought together, the Susskinds (Richard the father and Daniel the son) are particularly well placed to comment. Daniel, currently lecturing in economics at Balliol College at the University of Oxford and Richard, a recent Cabinet advisor, bring a first-principles (and historical) approach to the question of why we need professionals in the first place.


Faced with legal issues, health challenges, educational needs, financial complexities, and the building and engineering of their environment, the citizens of the Middle Ages couldn’t possibly know what was required to make informed decisions. The professions – lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, engineers and so on – emerged to answer this need, with what the Susskinds stress is their common offer: “practical expertise”.

Today, information networks are providing access to such expertise while radically bypassing the professional gatekeeper, in ways that make clients feel more personally empowered.

Thus we turn up at our doctor’s with more web-collated information on our persistent leg wound than a field paramedic. If search engines struggle to turn up the answers we seek, we find the solution ourselves in a jungle of user forums where we interpret and judge the practical opinions of others. This amounts to the devolution of a classic professional competence.

And if all this cyber-centricity puts irreparable strain on our relationships, we can kick off divorce proceedings by formulating the relevant legal documents online – completing the routine tasks with what might be, under the circumstances, a welcome impersonality.

Dispute resolution

Already eBay’s software resolves 60 million disputes per year without the involvement of a single lawyer – more than 40 times the number of civil cases registered annually in the courts of England and Wales.

And more students sign up for Harvard’s online courses in a single year than have ever attended its Massachusetts campus. The Vatican has even launched an official app to help sinners prepare for confession (though with the usual proviso that it is no substitute for the real thing).

“This debate is not about what’s best for you,” Richard Susskind warned an increasingly agitated audience of professionals at University College London’s Kennedy Theatre last week, at an event to mark the book’s release. “It’s about what’s attractive for recipients.”

By the time the distinguished panel assembled for the event was due to speak, the mood resembled that of the proverbial turkey farm recently privy to the true significance of Christmas. But the panellists’ confidence in the uniqueness of their individual cases was undimmed.

Michael Briggs, a judge in the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, welcomed the efficiency that machines could bring to the legal profession, but stressed that clients would never choose a smart computer program over a lawyer with moral principles at heart. And David Lomas, who leads UCL’s School of Medical and Life Sciences, asserted with equal confidence that machines could never match the relationship of trust patients require from their physicians.

Given the increasingly high costs of accessing legal assistance and the unavoidably high false diagnosis rates among doctors, one cannot help but wonder whether the public truly shares the concerns over technology that some so readily attribute to them.

As the professionals in the audience piled in with increasingly frantic justifications of their own indispensability, the authors’ frustration was palpable. When one doctor took to the floor to say that machines would never be able to deliver babies, Richard Susskind cut in to explain it was no longer a question of whether they could encroach into such sensitive areas, but whether or not they should.

Moral boundaries

Instead, the debate we must have before it is too late should centre on where we place the moral boundaries. Should a robot judge ever be given authority to pass a death sentence, or a digital physician advise a family on when to pull the plug on their relative’s life support system?

The unusually patient explanations in The Future of The Professions give a sense of the official pushback the authors have encountered. Richard Susskind recalls being censured by the UK Law Society for “bringing the legal profession into disrepute”. His crime? A mid-1980s prediction that email would become a natural medium for lawyer-client relations.

As creator of the world’s first commercially available “expert” legal software in 1988, the elder Susskind loves the current renaissance of applied AI. In a world where a new medical paper is published every 41 seconds, the vast data-crunching of “learning-machines” such as IBM’s Watson or Google’s DeepMind could not just provide a safety check for the judgements of human professionals, but also make fresh diagnoses.

The Susskinds foresee the professions “decomposed” into their various tasks and scattered across new divisions of labour like “process analysts”, “knowledge engineers” and “system providers”. “Quasi-trust” is all that would be required for open networks of expertise shaped by reputation and ratings to flourish: think eBay, Airbnb or Uber.

In this new compact of digital access, DIY enthusiasm and ever-smarter machines, human professionals are no longer the “sage on the stage” but the “guide on the side”. No doubt the traditional credentialing (and occupational ego) of the lawyer, doctor or teacher will have to change.

The writers leave a meaty role for “craftspersons” – those professionals whose rare talent and sensibility can still surpass the capabilities of the coming matrix – though in a scenario where AI is embedded throughout our social exchanges, it’s hard to see how they’ll be anything other than relics.

If she took empathy classes, Carol Beer could still draw a para-professional wage in the coming years. But she might also have to hear what her devices are actually telling her. “Computer says: ‘Shall we?'”

Image credit: Floris Leeuwenberg/The Cover Story/Corbis

The Future of the Professions: How technology will transform the work of human experts Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind Oxford University Press