What if everyone could be an expert?
Far-fetched, you think? Well, in fact, the “what if” is no longer speculative; it is here already.
Talk to people in such professional service industries as private banking, auditing, consulting, even engineering, and you begin to hear concerns about the commoditisation of professional knowledge.
A consulting civil engineer (the field in which I was first educated, and still find so deliciously complex) admitted to me that much of what you need to know in that field is online, and that their corporate clients were a new breed who didn’t so much want what he and his colleagues already knew (since that was easily available), as what they didn’t know.
Increasingly, tax preparation is being automated, and even auditing is going the way of algorithmic review and big data “sweeps” instead of sampling. Artificial intelligence is writing much of the content that you’re reading (although not this!), and Jancis Robinson, the wine expert and writer, recently wrote that she has “gone from being a unique provider of information to having to fight for attention.”
Increasingly, expertise is losing the respect that for years had earned it premiums in any market where uncertainty was present and complex knowledge valued. Along with it, we are shedding our reverence for “expert evaluation,” losing our regard for our Michelin guides and casting our lot in with the peer-generated Yelps of the world.
Not only is the character of expertise changing, but at the same time, new client needs are emerging. Firms are fearful of being vulnerable to an unknown (not uncertain) future; and at the same time, conditioned by living in an internet world, they expect instant knowledge responses at reasonable prices. Expertise providers are finding that the models that they have long relied upon (e.g., the familiar five forces model) are losing some of their potency, as they are based upon assumed knowledge that is increasingly difficult to determine (What industry are we in? Who are our competitors? What are our core-competencies?), and are more like time-lapse photography in presentation than the customer’s contemporary expectations of real-time, virtual streaming engagement.
If genuine expertise is no longer commanding its traditional premium in the marketplace, and if the old ways of conveying expertise are also in upheaval, what then do experts have to offer?
An answer might be found in David W. Maister et.al.’s trust equation for the professional service firm:
If trustworthiness is the coin of the realm for business advisors, and if Maister and his colleagues are correct in describing the factors that determine trustworthiness, then it would appear that while credibility is being commoditised via popular access to expertise and artificial intelligence, and reliability is the attribute that could actually be increasing for all, thanks to AI, then intimacy and self-orientation are the two remaining variables that are independent of algorithmic thinking and ubiquitous availability. They must be exactly what Richard Straub, president and founder of the Peter Drucker Society Europe, had in mind when we he observed:
Being human is consciously to bring judgment, intuition, creativity, empathy and values into play. In business, it is the domain of entrepreneurial thinking and innovation, of weighing decisions, of collaboration and trust – qualities that are utterly different from the machine logic of networked sensors and processors.
“Being human,” then, becomes a real hope for continued differentiation within the business of expertise, where the familiarity of the expert with the client, and access to the key expertise consumers at the right time and place are critical sources of value in the delivery of such knowledge.
Could it be, that after several decades of managerial professionalism arguing that “what you know” is more important than “who you know,” we are suddenly right back where we started from; where successful expertise provision depends more upon such “soft skills” as intimacy and self-orientation, than it does upon credibility and reliability?
Or, rather, since the advent of AI and algorithmic thinking have now made credibility and reliability tickets to the game rather than real differentiators, that it will be how expertise is delivered, and to whom, that will become the real source of premiums in the expertise business?
This is quite a departure from where we have been in the past.
It affects career potential, skills development and the entire value-chain of organizations that serve the expertise business.
Perhaps, most ironic of all is the idea that it took the most artificial of intelligence to rekindle the promise of humanity in interpersonal relations.
Bill Fischer is a Professor at IMD business school in Switzerland. He is co-founder and director of IMD’s partnership program with MIT/Sloan: Driving Strategic Innovation. He was previously President and Dean of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), in Shanghai, and is co-author of the book Reinventing Giants. This article is © 2016 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. and here with permission.
10 Comments
I assume the concerns raised will be afforded the same weighting as those of the workers in all manner of workplaces where technology provided a more cost effective solution to those who were profiting from the exercise. ie: Nil.
A significant reason the positions you describe were held to be of value was more to do with restriction of access to the information required to complete a task and the requirement to be affiliated with a professional body to allow a person to work and for that work to be deemed acceptable.
Many things are not difficult to understand but have been made convoluted as a form of protectionism.
As the knowledge is now easily found or shared, many find they are able to sidestep the middleman and their fees.
As an ex "consulting building services engineer" who got out 15+ years ago as the writing was on the wall I just have to laugh. Sure its on the web, but what you pay a professional engineer for is how to put all the bits together and know its right, ie safe, cost effective and long lasting. Of course I got out because a) NZ is so small and simple, most work can be done by "glorified" tradesmen plus b) we had / have an excess of engineers which just drives the price of labour down. So what did I do? facing 25 years of marginal work I got out and I learned new stuff in an area that had/has high demand, IT. Will it last? I dont know but it certianly has lasted 15 years for me so far. What does the future hold for me? well I am actively building a second skill, or given my working life actually developing a 4th. marine engineer --> building services engineer --> IT worker --> working retirement. That last one is indeed going to need a lot of contacts and skills/ability in this area. This takes time of course and you have to understand that, make a decision and act early, years and of course effort so Richard Straub's observation strikes a cord here for me.
One of the interesting things though so while electronics and fast food answers the ever increasing demand for cheap instant gratification this simply cant translate into all areas even if the expectation is it should.
Finally, AI isnt there yet by a long way, and it might never get there and if it does will it reach commodity pricing? not so sure on that myself. That of course assumes exponential growth on a finite planet ie never ending increasing energy use (plus intensity) to support Moore's law, I think not.
If an engineer can be replaced by an AI doing by the book work (and the user taking on huge liabilities without understand what they are doing) then they are not doing any sophisticated engineering. I have no doubt that there are engineers out there that will be replaced by AI but professional engineers should be providing a high level advice service based on their knowledge and experience.
There are also many areas requiring on site inspections and advice/instructions to be issued that are not by the book and where you need to relate to workers. Expert witness work is also required for Courts.
I can envision a future where I have AIs producing reports and designs for myself under my supervision. So they have potential to be worker replacements but you still need an expert to make sure they don't do something that a human can identify as being stupid. No doubt some people will use AIs for themselves and create a massive problem for which I will be called in to problem solve the situation.
I see a future where people will still make the same uninformed decisions as they do today but they will use an AI to screw up even worse than they do now. A lot of technician level jobs will disappear though.
Engineering knowledge is not learnable 'off the net' on a 'as needed for the job' basis as you almost always need massive prerequisite knowledge before you can understand the next level then the next level. Thats why you do 2-3 years extra math at uni on top of high school; the top level of high school (to a usable level, eg 80% pass) being out of reach of 90% of people (esp tradies) anyway. Tech math being killer papers with large drop out rates even for good engineering students. Unless you understand the fundamentals you're a hazzard in the engineering field where getting it wrong can be deadly, so AI will never replace higher level expertise where accountability counts for as much as getting the right answer.
Accounting, even law, less prereq knowledge needed to understand any of the concepts (hence the massive amounts of bush lawyers who are a danger to themselves and anyone they advise), if you can read you can likely get a loose grip of the key concepts, but gray areas and the accountability thing still mean you wont ever see law robots as even human decisions in law are questionable and only get accepted due to the respect given to a judge in arriving at their decision
I even question whether lower level skills that can be easily learnt of the net will be impacted. Any one can fix their own car by looking up the job on youtube. It's almost always undoing a set of bolts in a particular order. Yet very few people do, or have the time or will to bother to do this sort of work themselves, esp where doing it themselves will take 5x the time of a skilled person.
The interesting thing is just how cheap electronics really is to make. I am just starting to learn electronics and programming with an Arduino kit, $86USD from aliexpress,
So just one part, $13US v $160 in jaycar,
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/37-IN-1-BOX-SENSOR-KITS-FOR-ARDUINO-HIGH…
just why is a 12 fold increase in price justified?
or past $300NZ in NZ for all the bits v what is $120NZD to my door.
Past that I am going to build my own 3 axis cnc router using cnclinux (plus some other automation plans).
Apart from that once you make a design and a dedicated board in say a microwave its really a few dollars for the electronics and a box, but whats the retail on the finished product? wow, just wow.
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