A personal catastrophe occurred to me a week ago – my iPhone wouldn’t charge. To be more precise the charging cable, which had become difficult to insert into the phone, then it refused to go in at all. Such is our reliance on smart phones that I panicked and saw my personal and work life becoming severely limited. Charging problems can be fundamental if not terminal and visions of time consuming and possibly visits to an Apple Genius Baralso loomed large.
Then I calmed down and did what I do for every technical challenge these days – I Googled it typing into the search engine literally “how do I fix an iPhone that won’t charge”. The top and surprising answer was a not very technical Remove any debris from the charging port on the bottom of your device.The recommendation was to do this with a wooden stick to avoid damaging the charging point. I used a cocktail stick and removed a load of fluff after which the cable worked perfectly again.
Prior to the Internet and increasingly smart search engines the only way to repair a complex electrical appliance was to take it to a (probably expensive) local repair shop or send it back to the manufacturer or for large items arrange a call out engineer (also costly). However, our knowledge sources have now drastically changed and this fundamentally affects us as professionals.
How we research and locate the very knowledge we need for our work has been completely revolutionised. As Richard Susskind comments in his book The Future of the Professions:
“Half of US doctors use the app known as Epocrates, a digital drug-reference resource that computerizes the task of finding out how different drugs interact. This task was once a time-consuming, often inconclusive piece of excavation from a 2,500-page drug-reference manual, known as the Physicians Desk Reference.”
In the legal field I use a very useful appdeveloped by a law firm called DLA Piper on the GDPR. And if the doctors and lawyers can use this sort of app why cannot their patients? How long is it before an app exists which enables any citizen to look up any law applicable in their country. Francis Bacon coined the phrase “Knowledge is power” and it is with arcane and hard to find knowledge that we professionals have to some extent protected our preserved our privileged position in society.
The second part of the title of The Future of the Professions is “How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts”. This is the challenging and also liberating aspect of our rapidly evolving professional world. In the future our clients will not need to come to us and ask us what the law on GDPR or anything else is. Google or some app or other will arm them with that knowledge.
What they will not know is how best to apply that base knowledge in any given context. For this reason I remain optimistic about our future as professionals. In a recent World Economic Forum articlethe global chair of the law firm Baker McKenzie commented: The fundamental issue is trust. Our human instinct is to want to speak to a human. I don’t think that will change. Trust is what we crave, it's what separates us from machines; empathy, human instinct, an ability to read nuances, shake hands, and build collaborative relationships.
George Bernard Shaw said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” We as professionals must be reasonable and adapt to changing technology even if it shakes the very foundations of our work as it inevitably will do.
Whatever we do we must continue to learn and adapt in our professional life as knowledge forges ahead – as the old Chinese saying goes Studying is like sailing against the current: a boat must forge ahead or it will be swept downstream.
Then I calmed down and did what I do for every technical challenge these days – I Googled it typing into the search engine literally “how do I fix an iPhone that won’t charge”. The top and surprising answer was a not very technical Remove any debris from the charging port on the bottom of your device.The recommendation was to do this with a wooden stick to avoid damaging the charging point. I used a cocktail stick and removed a load of fluff after which the cable worked perfectly again.
Prior to the Internet and increasingly smart search engines the only way to repair a complex electrical appliance was to take it to a (probably expensive) local repair shop or send it back to the manufacturer or for large items arrange a call out engineer (also costly). However, our knowledge sources have now drastically changed and this fundamentally affects us as professionals.
How we research and locate the very knowledge we need for our work has been completely revolutionised. As Richard Susskind comments in his book The Future of the Professions:
“Half of US doctors use the app known as Epocrates, a digital drug-reference resource that computerizes the task of finding out how different drugs interact. This task was once a time-consuming, often inconclusive piece of excavation from a 2,500-page drug-reference manual, known as the Physicians Desk Reference.”
In the legal field I use a very useful appdeveloped by a law firm called DLA Piper on the GDPR. And if the doctors and lawyers can use this sort of app why cannot their patients? How long is it before an app exists which enables any citizen to look up any law applicable in their country. Francis Bacon coined the phrase “Knowledge is power” and it is with arcane and hard to find knowledge that we professionals have to some extent protected our preserved our privileged position in society.
The second part of the title of The Future of the Professions is “How Technology will Transform the Work of Human Experts”. This is the challenging and also liberating aspect of our rapidly evolving professional world. In the future our clients will not need to come to us and ask us what the law on GDPR or anything else is. Google or some app or other will arm them with that knowledge.
What they will not know is how best to apply that base knowledge in any given context. For this reason I remain optimistic about our future as professionals. In a recent World Economic Forum articlethe global chair of the law firm Baker McKenzie commented: The fundamental issue is trust. Our human instinct is to want to speak to a human. I don’t think that will change. Trust is what we crave, it's what separates us from machines; empathy, human instinct, an ability to read nuances, shake hands, and build collaborative relationships.
George Bernard Shaw said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” We as professionals must be reasonable and adapt to changing technology even if it shakes the very foundations of our work as it inevitably will do.
Whatever we do we must continue to learn and adapt in our professional life as knowledge forges ahead – as the old Chinese saying goes Studying is like sailing against the current: a boat must forge ahead or it will be swept downstream.
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