The Future of the Professions Quotes

“If we leave it to professionals themselves to reinvent their workplace, are we asking the rabbits to guard the lettuce?”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“People generally prefer problem-avoidance and problem-containment to problem-solving.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“We are advancing into a post-professional society.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“Knowledge, however, is non-rival.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“Watson Doesn’t Know It Won on “Jeopardy!”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“As Voltaire would caution, in reforming or transforming the professions, we should not let the best be the enemy of the good.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“Many of today’s students who are training to be traditional professionals will, in due course, be engaged as knowledge engineers. These new professionals will specialize in designing certain kinds of online service—we call this the ‘knowledge engineering’ model (section 5.7).”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“But in practice there is no clear reason why a division of labour in society should necessarily imply a division of moral behaviour as well.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“Sometimes experts say that their knowledge cannot be articulated, that it is ‘gut reaction’ or ‘intuition’. But through introspection and with the support of ‘knowledge engineers’ (specialists in knowledge elicitation—see section 6.8), they often find that they are able to model their expertise.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“Put bluntly, professionals tend not to like sharing what they know with other professionals.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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?”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“More people in our world, in other words, have mobile phones than toothbrushes (which perhaps speaks as much about dental hygiene as ‘pervasive computing’).”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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).”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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 Čapek.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“In the past, machines have taken on the grunt work, releasing professionals to focus on tasks that require their brains or dexterity.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“This is a new division of labour, and traditional professionals sometimes struggle here because they are no longer in the driving-seat.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“One of the jobs of what we call the ‘process analyst’ (section 6.8) is to identify the level of person best suited for the range of decomposed tasks.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“When professional work is decomposed, constituent tasks tend to be allocated to the least costly sources consistent with the quality and nature of the work involved.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“Checklists, which are a form of routinization, ‘remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit’.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“The first is the notion that machines and systems will work alongside tomorrow’s professionals as partners. The challenge here is to allocate tasks, as between human beings and machines, according to their relative strengths.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“More than this, however, professionals should become directly involved in the development of the systems that handle and deliver practical expertise.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

“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.”
― Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts