I opened space yesterday for a group hosted by the Open University to talk about the future of knowledge and learning in the professions. We had some wonderfully wide-ranging conversations and I got some lovely warm feedback on my delivery of the process.
Edward Hill called this session: "What will be the impact on trainees learning when traditional 'low level' tasks are automated?" and I joined in.
I think it's interesting to see where people spot the first cracks appearing in the structures of Organisation. Edward's point was that in Professional Service Firms (like accountants, lawyers etc.) there are traditionally pyramid structures with a few partners doing client relations at the top and lots of trainees at the bottom doing what is known as "grunt work" at the bottom, which gets refined by layers of management. Grunt work often means proof-reading or going through documents mechanically finding mistakes or inconsistencies. AI and machine learning are getting really good at getting the results more efficiently. But a trainee lawyer or accountant gets more out of reading through those documents than simply understanding that their work depends on horrible grinding attention to detail. They're also (if they're bright) picking up the way that these documents are written and structured and why the documents exist in the first place. And they find some camaraderie in the common struggle of all people at that level to maintain their professional interest while having to do soul-less repetitive work.
So automation is breaking through into this world, having transformed industrial processes and the most straightforward of paper-based (what we used to call 'clerical') work.
My prejudice is that the technology is moving faster than people notice at the moment and that's a recipe for things breaking before we've come up with solutions for them. I'd hope for a wave of professional service startups who might doing things differently and resist acquisition by the big fish.