This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others, to work as they did in the 20th century. The Future of the Professions explains how 'increasingly capable systems' -- from telepresence to artificial intelligence -- will bring fundamental change in the way that the 'practical expertise' of specialists is made available in society. The authors challenge the 'grand bargain' -- the arrangement that grants various monopolies to today's professionals. They argue that our current professions are antiquated, opaque and no longer affordable, and that the expertise of their best is enjoyed only by a few. In their place, they propose six new models for producing and distributing expertise in society. The book raises important practical and moral questions. In an era when machines can out-perform human beings at most tasks, what are the prospects for employment, who should own and control online expertise, and what tasks should be reserved exclusively for people? Based on the authors' in-depth research of more than ten professions, and illustrated by numerous examples from each, this is the first book to assess and question the relevance of the professions in the 21st century.
In Online Courts and the Future of Justice, Richard Susskind, the world’s most cited author on the future of legal services, shows how litigation will be transformed by technology and proposes a solution to the global access-to-justice problem. In most advanced legal systems, the resolution of civil disputes takes too long, costs too much, and the process is not just antiquated; it is unintelligible to ordinary mortals. The courts of some jurisdictions are labouring under staggering backlogs - 100 million cases in Brazil, 30 million in India. More people in the world now have internet access than access to justice. Drawing on almost 40 years in the fields of legal technology and jurisprudence, Susskind shows how we can use the remarkable reach of the internet (more than half of humanity is now online) to help people understand and enforce their legal rights. Online courts provide 'online judging' - the determination of cases by human judges but not in physical courtrooms. Instead, evidence and arguments are submitted through online platforms through which judges also deliver their decisions. Online courts also use technology to enable courts to deliver more than judicial decisions. These 'extended courts' provide tools to help users understand relevant law and available options, and to formulate arguments and assemble evidence. They offer non-judicial settlements such as negotiation and early neutral evaluation, not as an alternative to the public court system but as part of it. A pioneer of online courts, Susskind maintains that they will displace much conventional litigation. He rigorously assesses the benefits and drawbacks, and looks ahead, predicting how AI, machine learning, and virtual reality will likely come to dominate court service.
When we started working on this book in 2010, our principal focus was on what the future might hold for the professions. In the course of our research and writing, however, we realized that to confine our attention to our current professions would, for two related reasons, be too limiting. In the first instance, when we gave thought to why we have the professions at all, and when we explored theories of the professions in trying to make sense of the work of professionals, we unearthed a more basic and important question that had to be answered: How do we share practical expertise in society? It became clear to us that ‘through the professions’ was only one answer to this question. In a print-based industrial society the professions have emerged as the standard solution to one shortcoming of human beings, namely, that we have ‘limited understanding’. When people need help in certain kinds of situation in life, those that call for specific types of specialist knowledge, then we naturally turn to professionals. But we cannot assume that this current answer is the only or best answer for all time. We should be alive to the possibility, as we move from a print-based industrial society into a technologybased Internet society, that there are alternatives. And we should also want to investigate these. Which leads to our second reason for concluding that our current professions are too limited an object of study. When we undertook our research at the vanguard, we found that technology and the Internet are not just improving old ways of working; they are also enabling us to bring about fundamental change. They are providing new ways to make practical expertise far more widely available. And so, what is coming over the horizon are not just better ways of handling the work within the current remit of the professions, but systems that are greatly extending our capacity to sort out problems that arise from insufficient access to practical expertise. In short, therefore, we concluded in the early stages of our work that to concentrate only on the future of the professions would be to let the tail wag the dog.
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