The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, Updated Edition

To do this, we follow Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblances’. 18 This is the idea that some phenomena appear related not because they have some unique characteristic in common, but instead because they share a range of ‘overlapping and crisscrossing’ similarities. Four siblings, for instance, may look alike not because they have a p

Technology has begun to transform social class, economic activity, political discourse, working life and the limits of human activity.

In the United Kingdom, for example, 75 per cent of senior judges and 43 per cent of barristers went to independent or fee-paying schools (which educate only 7 per cent of schoolchildren). 4 Almost half of newspaper columnists went to Oxford or Cambridge. 5 In 2011, among undergraduates accepted for medical school, 57 per cent were from the highest

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

Professor Yochai Benkler, Harvard University, author of The Wealth of Networks