Once regarded as safe havens, the professions are now in the eye of the storm

But today these islands of security are being battered as never before. Professional-services firms are becoming more business-minded: Accenture now contracts lots of work to people in the emerging world and has abandoned the partnership model to become a public company. Customers are getting fussier: big firms will no longer put up with consultancies that woo them with partners and then send in a team of juniors. But the most important source of instability is information technology, argues “The Future of the Professions”, a new book by Richard Susskind, a consultant, and Daniel Susskind, an Oxford don (a father-and-son combo).

Machines are challenging the professions’ two most important claims to being special: their ability to advance the frontiers of knowledge and their exclusive licence to apply their expertise to an unordained laity. IBM and the Bayor College of Medicine have developed a system called KnIT (“knowledge integration toolkit”) that scans the medical literature and generates new hypotheses for research problems. Computer scientists in Tel Aviv University have invented an algorithm that, using facial-recognition software, is solving a puzzle that has kept Torah scholars busy for decades: piecing together 300,000 ancient Jewish manuscripts that were found, many torn and tattered, in the attic of an old Cairo synagogue. Various bits of software regularly outperform legal experts in predicting the outcome of court decisions from patent disputes to America’s Supreme Court.

New technology is enabling machines and para-professionals to take over many routine tasks. Programs developed by Kensho, a startup, provide answers to financial questions such as what happens to technology stocks when there is a privacy scare. Nurses and “physician associates”, equipped with computers and diagnostic tools, are doing more and more of the work once reserved for doctors.

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