Post-professionalism — Part 4 – Digital disruption
Over the last 20 years, we have seen the gap between what is analogue and what is digital, what is human and what is machine, collapse.
Consider this on the hyper-personalisation of AI in a recent ‘Stackpost from Scott Belsky. Keep in mind the earlier piece in this series on atomisation and late capitalism, and also how things like this are going to affect future healthcare practice;
’Two weeks traveling Japan proved to be the perfect setting to contemplate some of the sweeping changes facing our society over the coming years and decades. The smart people I know generally agree that 80% of the work of 80%+ of jobs will be refactored significantly by AI… And it’s still early days! So, the question that keeps me up at night is, what are us humans gonna do with all of our newfound time? Which brings me back to Japan, and this quaint Kyoto restaurant I found myself sitting in one evening. There were 10 seats, one chef/owner and one apprentice, and the most incredibly crafted experience. It wasn’t expensive, but everything was intentional. I found myself admiring this sensational and remarkably unscalable experience. The chef seems to make a good living, loves meeting interesting people, and gets to be wildly creative (the selection of glassware, the decor, the care and craft applied to every dish). Japan is full of these experiences, where art, curiosity, and craftsmanship yield tiny scattered wonders like “owl cafes,” micro arcades, plastic food shops, cotton candy shops, and the list goes one. I found myself wondering, why aren’t there 1000x more of these experiences in all societies? Why must the purpose of business be to scale, grow bigger, become franchises, squeeze in more seats, and compromise quality for automation and reach? Could a fundamental change in society, like mass automation and AI, spur both the growth and demand of human-intensive highly crafted unscalable experiences?’ Link.
Of course, people like the economist John Maynard Keynes and the philosopher Bertrand Russell have been arguing that future humans will benefit greatly from automation since the 1930s, but the effects of digital disruption go far beyond questions of whether robots will do most of the surgery, triaging, prescribing, diagnosing, therapy, and empathy work of healthcare in the future. (They will).
Perhaps the most telling digital disruptions have arrived with some of the most mundane technologies. People’s ubiquitous use of digital Google Maps, for instance, has meant that people are rarely ever lost anymore. Being lost and using one’s own wits to find safe haven has always been a crucial human skill. Perhaps people in the future will be less resourceful when they encounter serious illness having never had to find their way out of the woods at night.
Spotify and Apple Music have given us the ability to play only the songs we love. But has this engendered a belief that other things like educational pathways and healthcare choices should work the same way?
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and other social networking apps have replaced validation by proof with popularity. And YouTube and Wikipedia have shown us that professionals were never the only repositories of expertise and that so much knowledge could be shared for free.
We may be experiencing the most disruptive period ever in the history of healthcare with changes happening at lightning speed. Tomorrow’s healthcare professional is a 10-year-old on Discord today. How they see the world will shape the future of healthcare.
Daniel and Richard Susskind in their book The Future of the Professions make the point that ‘If professionals are only able to share their experience and knowledge by advising on a face-to-face basis, then there can be few beneficiaries of the genuinely outstanding’ (Susskind and Susskind, 2015).
This is a very common feature of many forms of healthcare practice and part of the reason they believe digitisation will have such a profound impact on our work. Digitisation succeeds because it offers the promise of mass customisation and personalised care; ‘systems and processes that do indeed meet the specific needs of individual recipients of service, and yet are implemented with a level of efficiency that is analogous with mass production’ (ibid).
Put another way, digitisation is how the health professions’ monopoly on goodness and expertise is finally broken by late capitalist atomisation.
Scott Belsky seems to suggest that such large-scale, digitally-mediated personalisation may be the direction centralised healthcare tracks in the future. But he also suggests that such moves will create spaces in which other forms of work become possible: work that goes in the opposite direction and makes a virtue out of bespoke care;
‘As human workflows are refactored by a step-function and our capacity is liberated, I see a compelling future where the demand for and economic viability of crafted non-scalable experiences transforms society. The “experience economy,” is already underway with the emergence of experts for everything - from lactation consultants and pet therapists to for-hire violinists and chefs and…who knows what’s next. I enjoyed this post by Dror Poleg where he forecasts a world where “most people no longer need to work. Our survival depends on convincing them it's ok to do something else.” “There are many more professions to invent,” he declares, “and they will only be invented if more people experiment.”’ Link.
Then again, perhaps AI will do this for us.
References
Susskind R, Susskind D. The future of the professions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; 2015.