The technology-based internet society
How has new technologies and advances in knowledge processing changed traditional working professions?
The following is an edited extract from The Future of the Professions by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind.
Information technology and the Internet have combined to transform the information-creating, information-seeking, and information-dissemination habits of human beings. While print brought great change, the process of printing itself for centuries remained a specialist activity, requiring heavy-duty equipment and skilled human beings. Although we think little today of using word processing software and laser printers to produce high-quality documentation, these facilities were rare as recently as the 1980s and only came into widespread usage in the 1990s. Most people today, at work and home, have immediate access to a set of technologies that can support the production of high-quality printed material. A succession of technological innovations, such as large-volume photocopiers, transferable word processing files, high-capacity printers, and Internet-based file transfer, have changed the way we produce and distribute documents. We used to call some of this ‘desktop publishing’, but so pervasive have the facilities become that we no longer distinguish them with their own label.
However, an improved capacity to create and share polished documents has not led us to a world in which knowledge and expertise are easily accessible and straightforwardly understood by all. There can be little doubt that the Internet enables easy access to large quantities of content, but it is also the case that websites, social networks, and online publishing have generated more source material than we had before, most of which, once again, is impenetrable to the non-specialist. While lay users can undertake basic searches online — in medicine, law, architecture, accounting, and elsewhere — the fruits of this work tend to be collections of potentially relevant but technically complex documents or web pages rather than answers to problems or distilled advice. An online encyclopedia, for example, may educate and orientate, but it does not generally advise, counsel, or tell users what next steps to take with the challenges before them. What is more, it is not easy for most users to know when online resources in complex areas are authoritative and reliable.
This analysis leads some sceptics to conclude that the Web and social media has a damaging effect on society, creating mountains of information that increase rather than decrease the need for specialists who can reliably interpret and apply this information in particular circumstances. This conclusion, however, mistakenly assumes that we have fully transitioned from the print-based industrial society into what we call the technology-based Internet society (note that the ‘technology’ here is largely ‘information technology’). We argue instead, as we did in 1996, that we are still in a long transitional phase between these two eras, and that so-called ‘information overload’ is one of the many unfortunate but temporary consequences of being in this interim state of flux. We accept that, during this transitional phase, traditional professionals working in conventional institutions will still be needed as the main interface between the lay person and the bodies of knowledge to which they might now have access but not yet the wherewithal to interpret. However, once we have fully progressed into the technology-based Internet society, the quantity and complexity of materials will be hidden from users, new technologies themselves will help with their interpretation, and so traditional professionals will no longer be this dominant interface between lay people and the practical expertise that they need to apply to their own particular circumstances and problems.
Central to this thesis is a concept we first articulated in 1996, known as ‘the Technology Lag.’
The Technology Lag described the delay between what technologists then called ‘data processing’ and ‘knowledge processing’. And we went on to argue that we would not have progressed to a mature technology-based Internet society until the lag was eliminated and knowledge processing became equal to the task of extricating us from the information management dilemmas left by its ancestor, data processing.
In other words, we were saying that technologies such as photocopiers, scanners, word processors, and e-mail were giving rise in the 1990s to the information overload for which we had not yet invented the technological ripostes. Thus, in the professions, the rapidly growing bodies of source materials were like a fire-hose of information blasting at the laity; and, far from removing the need for expert advice, we seemed, in the mid-1990s, to require professionals more than ever before. Yet we predicted that:
we are now refining our techniques in the field of knowledge processing and gradually developing systems which will help us analyze and manage the vast bodies of information which we created for ourselves. And these systems will themselves help us pinpoint all but only the material relevant to our particular purposes as users.
This prediction was met with great scepticism at the time. However, we only need to reflect on the capabilities of search facilities like Google, the success of data science initiatives (for example, in the field of Big Data), and the emergence of a new wave of artificial intelligence systems such as Watson, to realize that the Technology Lag is now closing steadily. Our prediction then, ‘that advances in knowledge processing will be stunning in the coming twenty-five years, thus easing us from this transitional period’ into what we now call the ‘technology-based Internet society’, will prove, we think, to be fairly accurate.
Just as our demand for specialist guidance from expert human beings has changed over time, as the information substructure of society has shifted from orality to script and then to print, so we must expect a further shift as we progress into a world that is underpinned by processing power and communication capabilities that are much greater than in the past. The professions are knowledge-based, so that if the dominant means by which we store and communicate knowledge changes radically, then it is not a great leap to suppose that the way in which we store and communicate professional knowledge will similarly be transformed.
Richard Susskind is an author, speaker, and independent adviser to international professional firms and national governments. He is President of the Society for Computers and Law, IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England, and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute. His numerous books include the best-sellers, The End of Lawyers? (OUP, 2008) and Tomorrow’s Lawyers (OUP, 2013), his work has been translated into more than 10 languages, and he has been invited to speak in over 40 countries.
Daniel Susskind is a Lecturer in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he teaches and researches, and from where he has two degrees in economics. Previously, he worked for the British Government — in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and as a Senior Policy Adviser at the Cabinet Office. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.
They are co-authors of The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (Oxford University Press 2015).
