Revisiting the Arguments of Richard and Daniel Susskind

I decided to launch this blog late in the summer of 2015. One of the catalysts was a book called The Future of the Professions bv Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, a father (lawyer)-son (economist) team who live and work in England. The book was not yet published in the US, but I had received an advance copy.

The book is highly informative and in many ways fascinating. It is also provocative, and not surprisingly I disagreed with several of its key claims. Some months later, when I decided to write a lengthier essay on the same topic, I devoted part of my discussion to a brief summary of their argument and mentioned some of my misgivings.

Any doubts that I may have had about the power of the Internet were dispelled when, barely a week later, I received a note from the Susskinds themselves. Though we did not know one another, they had apparently learned of my critique through social media. They were making a trip to the United States—their book was now available in the US as well as the UK—and they expressed the hope that we could meet. My wife Ellen and I invited them to our home for brunch. Richard and Daniel turned out to be delightful guests, and we discovered many ideas, experiences, and persons whom we had in common.

Our conversation over bagels and lox also helped me to understand better our areas of agreement and disagreement. It is hard to dispute their point that digital technologies (e.g. powerful apps that can do one’s taxes or suggest an appropriate medical diagnosis and treatment) can make available a degree of expertise that ordinary individuals all over the world could not afford to hire and might not even be able to access. Indeed, various apps help almost everyone, while others are especially helpful to those who cannot afford the high fees charged by professionals in law, medicine, and other high-status occupations. I also agree with their point that many professionals—we talked particularly about individuals in law and accounting—are best thought of as business people whose loyalty now is directed toward the profitability of their respective companies and not, alas, to the founding values of their profession.

It’s important to separate the following questions:

1.) Are the predictions of the Susskinds likely to come to pass?

2.) If they do materialize, should we be pleased or distressed?

As to the first question, the Susskinds have made a convincing case that many if not all existing professions will be fundamentally disrupted by the powerful new technologies that have emerged in the past few decades. These technologies will make it possible, at a fraction of the present cost, for ordinary persons to have access to knowledge and services that until now were available only from other human beings (called professionals), who typically charged large sums for their services. It’s not clear which vendors will provide these services and whether these vendors will be reliable and trustworthy, but there is little doubt that the services will be widely available and frequently accessed.

It is by no means clear whether these trends will abolish all present and all conceivable future professions or instead lead to the creation of new professions. As an example, while they are not yet dubbed as professionals, technology specialists—such as those who control servers—have tremendous power, possibly amplified by the fact that their identities are currently largely unknown. It is conceivable that the rise of cyber-society will introduce a whole new set of professions and professionals who manage data, algorithms, hardware, software, privacy, and the like.

Also, as I argue in my original essay, not only are we unable to predict the effectiveness of various digital entities; we also cannot predict the kinds of problems and possibilities that may arise within and across nations. Issues ranging from climate change to digital warfare to the migration of huge populations to the lengthening of the life span may require all sorts of new human expertise which could well congeal into new professions.

It is also possible that, if most ordinary work comes to be done by digital entities, more attention will be directed toward creative activities, particularly in the arts, and to new and complex face-to-face social interactions among human beings. Both spheres could conceivably spawn new forms of professional expertise.

Turning to the second question, I’m persuaded that many individuals, particularly those without means to purchase expensive services from other human beings, will be better off obtaining those services from various technologies. In this sense, I am a utilitarian—the greatest good for the greatest number.

But I continue to have other concerns. First of all, human society has always depended upon work—the sweat of the human brow of the laborer as well as the furrowing of the brow of the professional. It’s not clear that, as a species, we will easily come up with an acceptable substitute. (I believe that the Susskinds share this worry.)

Second, I worry about who will be designing these platforms, apps, and technologies, who will “own” them, whether the designers and their products can be depended on (indeed, whether they’ll behave in a professional manner!), and what happens should the various new technologies point users in opposite directions… is there a “master” algorithm to consult? As the Romans put it, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?” (“Who will guard the guardians?”) Perhaps there are advantages to “muddling through,” a process that will be lost in a completely digitized society.

Finally, and this is central to the theme of a blog called “The Professional Ethicist,” the true professional—even though she may be rare and getting rarer—represents a remarkable human achievement. I stand in awe of individuals who devote years to mastering an area and use their expertise to serve others in a disinterested way, over a long period of time, without much attention to personal wealth or prestige or power, and then seek to transmit expertise and exemplary values to younger acolytes. I want to live in a world where it still matters to say of someone, “She is a real professional!”

I close by thanking Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind for their exemplary collegiality. They kindly accepted an invitation to speak at the American Philosophical Society, and I am likely to be a commentator. Conversations central to this blog are likely to continue for some time to come.

This is the sixth in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.”

Disruption #2: Digital Technology

As I argued, with respect to markets, disruptions are not necessarily destructive: they don’t necessarily destroy professions. But they exert pressures on professions and on professionals who are not always ready, willing, or able to resist those pressures.

In the “good old days,” clients either trusted professionals qua professionals, or they relied on the advice of their friends (who might or might not have good judgment with respect to the professionals and the professional expertise in question). Nowadays an enormous amount of information is readily available online about the competence of specific professionals, including a variety of rating systems. In general, it is more helpful to know what 100 or 1000 individuals think about a specific lawyer or doctor than simply to know what your three best friends have to say. But it is certainly possible to manipulate rating systems—for example, by mobilizing friends (or enemies) of the individual or site in question. It is also possible that large numbers of individuals could be seduced by irrelevant criteria, and still others could create procedures or apps that automatically tilt the scales of judgment.

When people invoke “the wisdom of crowds,” I often wink and respond, “And what of the stupidity of crowds?”. Similarly, when I am curious about the quality of a recently published book, I feel on much firmer ground reading, or speaking to, a few experts on the topic rather than valorizing the number of stars or “likes” the book received on a website. At the same time, if I have access both to experts and to the less discriminating but more numerous crowd, I am better off than if only one source of evaluation is available to me.

In general, cooperation between expert professionals, on the one hand, and experts in the digital media, on the other, can be salutary. Professionals need help in getting their messages out, and nowadays, only a naif would rely largely on the traditional media. Experts in the digital media are essential for transmitting messages and for tracking their impact; but unless these experts actually understand what is important for the professional who wants to fulfill her role completely and competently, they are likely to give feedback that is not helpful and perhaps misleading. As one long-involved in educational reform, I have considerable doubt that experts working for management consultancies can offer advice that is useful for educators; based on my own observations, what McKinsey has to say may be relevant for General Electric or General Motors but is rarely helpful for the public system in Big City, USA.

As a convenient example, let me use the launching of this blog. Without having financial resources to devote to it, I benefited from the advice of individuals with experience in the digital media. These included my assistant Danny Mucinskas, who divided the piece into sections and added illustrations that visibly(!) improved the attractiveness of the presentation. The number of responses received was extremely gratifying to me—because these responses came from individuals who are knowledgeable about the professions and thoughtful about the issues that I raised. But unless an expert on digital media could actually evaluate the feedback, he or she might erroneously conclude that forty or so responses was a tiny number without any conceivable impact. Better 400 or 40,000, whatever their range and their quality.

As a few commentators noted, we are at the earliest stages of understanding—indeed, of conceptualizing—how professionals in one or another domain can work expeditiously with experts in programming, social media, and big data. This terrain is ripe for experimentation. It is possible, as Charles Lang argues, that we may be able to develop algorithms that are more effective than groups of “live” experts; or as Richard Weissbourd suggests, that automated systems may be able to bring to bear diverse perspectives on complicated problems. But I worry about what we should do when there are hundreds of candidate algorithms, and I would not want to put any algorithm in charge of making that judgment call!

Let me take this opportunity to note a new and very important kind of expertise—the ability to ensure that digital communication tools are used in ways that are fair and accessible and that do not compromise privacy or promulgate privileged information. While those individuals who take care of servers and other features of the digital grid may not be officially designated as “professionals,” we depend on them to behave in a highly professional way!

Thanks to commentators Kendall Bronk, Henry Jenkins, Charles Lang, Seana Moran, Jake Seliger, Dennis Thompson, and Richard Weissbourd.

This is the fifth in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.”

Disruption #1: Markets

In characterizing markets as being disruptive in my essay on the future of the professions, I intended to use this term in a neutral or disinterested way. But it is quite possible that in that essay, my own uneasiness about market forces came through. I may have conveyed the impression that markets are necessarily destructive, as opposed to merely being disruptive.

Don’t get me wrong: I am a fan of markets in many places and in many ways. My family and I are and have been the beneficiaries of markets and market forces; so have millions of people in China and other countries. I’m glad that I live in a society and a world where markets exist and are allowed to function smoothly and without undue restriction. But I am by no means a market absolutist.

Indeed, in earlier centuries, markets were balanced or tempered by religious, ideological, or other political architectures (e.g. primogeniture, royalty). On the whole, I think that this tempering is a good thing. The reference in my essay to the year 1980—with the rise of market supremacy or hegemony around the globe, often called “the triumph of neo-liberalism”—was meant to be cautionary. I am sympathetic to the argument put forth by philosopher Michael Sandel: some things (body parts, as a reasonably uncontroversial examples) should not be for sale. And I believe that professions are more likely to maintain and display their virtues when they are, at least to some extent, protected from market forces.

As one instance, I am a skeptic about the role of markets in education, certainly for the education of younger persons and perhaps throughout the formal educational system. Once companies whose motivation is (inevitably) the seeking of profit invade the educational landscape, they are all too prone to confuse proceeds with progress. To be sure, many non-profit educational entities behave as if they were “for-profit” enterprises; but at least they operate by a different set of rules and do not explicitly create monetary incentives for employees. (I don’t approve of university management companies who compensate employees in terms of the profitability of their specific portfolios.) I do not object to charter schools in general but remain unsympathetic to for-profit charter networks and to voucher systems.

Let me emphasize two other points about markets:

First, markets can exert quite healthy influences on professions. While American institutions of higher education are largely non-profit, the market-like competition among them over the decades has on the whole been a good feature (so, too, the competitiveness among arts institutions, science museums, and the like). And certainly within professions, the market competition among hospital chains, or among law firms, has its positive benefits, as does the emergence of competition for specific services, such as the creation of prototype legal documents or variations within the same family of drugs.

Second, in corporate life, there is not an inherent zero sum game between profitability and a high ethical standard—that is, a standard that goes beyond simply remaining within the law. Ben Heineman has made that point eloquently in many articles and in his book High Performance with High Integrity. My colleagues William Damon and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi concur, adding that high ethical/professional standards are good for business in the long run. But the enormous pressures in the United States to achieve short-term profitability, as well as the imaginativeness (and even implicit endorsement) of efforts to cut corners while avoiding frankly illegal behavior leads to this unfortunate conclusion: professionalism in a highly marketized economy is always at risk. All too often, professionalism takes a back seat to profitability at any and all costs.

Thanks to commentators Steven Brint, Anne Colby, Stephen Gardner, Ben Heineman, Norman Ornstein, and Amelia Peterson.

This is the fourth in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.” 

A Conversation Between Evelyn Chow and Howard Gardner: Challenges to Common Spaces and the Common Good

By Daniel Mucinskas

In the exchange below, the Good Project’s Howard Gardner and former Harvard student Evelyn Chow discuss the creation of common spaces for the examination of ethics at work and what barriers may impede that type of communication.

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Evelyn: You have written before about the need to establish common spaces where individuals can discuss the ethical dimensions of their work. I believe that establishing a common space is predicated on open lines of communication between members of the commons.

And so I wonder: what are the limitations of the commons if communication is restricted in some structural or possibly insuperable way? This restriction could come in the form of regulation (e.g. a public market participant can only talk to bankers through highly controlled channels); hierarchy (e.g. an organization where those of different levels may rarely convene); cultural differences; and probably other factors as well.

Howard: You raise a good question about barriers to the construction of common spaces. I have written a bit about this—for example, in Daedalus, in my article “Reestablishing the Commons for the Common Good.” It’s a difficult challenge to construct a shared space for discussion that is viable across the board—one complicating factor is that an online forum is far from ideal. Instead, it’s preferable to have a face-to-face community and communication between people in person. Of course, when there is hierarchy in place, secrecy, and/or an ingroup/outgroup mentality, this may be impossible.

Evelyn: I also wonder about the role of trust and flatness in constructing a commons, especially in standard “professional” settings.

I have come to appreciate select aspects of hierarchy—these may enable the ethical worker to excel in his or her role, free from some of the concerns that might trouble others higher or lower in the organization. Maybe there could be a Wormhole Theory of corporate culture—the ability to collapse space, time, power, and wealth when confronting issues of common importance, but still operate in different galaxies for the most part, where the citizens of each are more relaxed in their respective atmospheres.

Howard: It’s easier to behave ethically when you remain in your own wormhole—or, to use a metaphor I like, remain in your own foxhole. When you are young and new, this is probably the best pattern. But as you gain in knowledge, influence, and power, you become more of a trustee—and that role requires that you examine operations in their totality, not just from your own vantage point, and that, when necessary, you blow your whistle loudly.

Evelyn: I think that this conundrum may also occur at a national, even a global level.

Recently, I read an interview with Mohamed El-Erian, the former CEO of PIMCO, on China.  El-Erian noted that China is facing a situation almost unknown to any governing body in history: a major global superpower with significant influence on global growth and markets that itself is still a developing economy. He argued that it would be in China’s own best interest to devalue their currency as much as possible to stimulate domestic growth. Yet, its induction last year into the IMF’s select group of reserve currencies, a mark of its systemic importance, precludes the Chinese government from doing so without introducing significant global volatility. This situation presents an interesting test of the boundaries of neighborly morality/the ethics of roles.

Howard: Thanks, Evelyn, for your astute comments and for broadening a contrast that was originally developed with respect to the professions, to a much larger stage—that of the world economy.

What’s Confusing about the Professions?

If what is (or is not) a profession was ever crystal clear, it is certainly not so any more. Nowadays almost any area of expertise can lay claim to being a profession. Not only does Expertise ABC call itself a profession, but this Expertise also lobbies to be recognized as such by degree granting schools, the courts, and the general public.

To make the situation even cloudier, non-professionals may borrow terminology from professions—as when a person who is involved in any kind of planning calls herself an “architect,” or, less formally, “a curator.” And nowadays, almost anyone who purports to know “anything about anything” feels free to label herself a consultant, a coach, or an adviser—official-sounding titles which, alas, all too often signify nothing. These individuals often mimic the paraphernalia of the “real professions”—and may also charge as much as degree-holding professions. After all, if you charge hundreds of dollars an hour, you must know a lot!

There is no “Pooh-Bah of the Professions”—no single voice or court that can declare a candidate profession as legitimate or disqualify it from consideration. Workers militate to be considered professions, and on occasion, as with the barber surgeons of days of yore, an occupation can lose its professional status. I believe that the burden falls an on any aspiring profession to demonstrate that it, and it alone, fulfills the desiderata that I outlined in the original essay and recapitulated in my second response (specifically, high levels of training with certification, fulfilling expectations associated with the role, offering services in a disinterested way, making complex individual decisions, etc.). But I’d add that in the current era—with so many possible routes to certification, many online—identifying a “true” or “genuine” profession is becoming increasingly difficult.

One possible distinction emanates from the essential characteristics once associated with the role of the professional: wisdom, disinterestedness, service.  In earlier times, many professionals stressed these features even as they minimized their  concern with market forces and rewards; nowadays, valorizing these ethical and social qualities may seem quaint, if not anachronistic.  Expertise trumps service. Nonetheless, these attributes remain as ideals—and legitimize the use of the describer “professional”—as in the phrase, “She behaved very professionally.”

My colleague Jal Mehta has kindly allowed me to link this blog to his insightful essay. Mehta delineates four separate challenges to the professions as currently constituted: briefly, Hegel (inner contradictions); Krauss (market determination of nearly every facet of economic and social life); Jackson (deference to the “common man”); and Sennett (craft as opposed to scientific knowledge). Taken together, this quartet of factors constitutes a formidable challenge to anyone who asserts that, for the professions, “business as usual” will suffice.

And what of the relation between academic disciplines, on the one hand, and professions, on the other? While one commentator on my original post deplored the narrowness of the academy and hailed the public mindedness of the professions, this distinction does not always hold. Some scholars have quite broad conceptions of their disciplines and welcome interdisciplinary work. Analogously, some professionals—as strict constructionists—do not see themselves as agents of broad public needs and concerns.

Thanks to commentators Steven Brint, Henry Jenkins, Jal Mehta, Norman Ornstein, Carol Thompson, and Dennis Thompson.

This is the third in a ten-part series in which I respond to the comments received regarding my essay “Is There a Future for the Professions? An Interim Verdict.”