Introduction

Abstract

This book is about the professions and the systems and people that will replace them. Our focus is on doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, tax advisers, management consultants, architects, journalists, and the clergy (amongst others), on the organizations in which they work, and the institutions that govern their conduct. Our main claim is that we are on the brink of a period of fundamental and irreversible change in the way that the expertise of these specialists is made available in society. Technology will be the main driver of this change. And, in the long run, we will neither need nor want professionals to work in the way that they did in the twentieth century and before. There is growing evidence that a transformation is already under way. More people signed up for Harvard’s online courses in a single year, for example, than have attended the actual university in its 377 years of existence. In the same spirit, there are a greater number of unique visits each month to the WebMD network, a collection of health websites, than to all the doctors working in the United States. In the legal world, three times as many disagreements each year amongst eBay traders are resolved using ‘online dispute resolution’ than there are lawsuits filed in the entire US court system. On its sixth birthday, the Huffington Post had more unique monthly visitors than the website of the New York Times, which is almost 164 years of age. The British tax authorities use a fraud-detection system that holds more data than the British Library (which has copies of every book ever published in the UK). In 2014 the US tax authorities received electronic tax returns from almost 48 million people who had used online tax preparation software rather than a tax professional to help them. At WikiHouse, an online community designed a house that could be ‘printed’ and assembled for less than £50,000 (built successfully in London during September 2014). The architectural firm Gramazio & Kohler used a group of autonomous flying robots to assemble a structure out of 1,500 bricks.