Bloomberg Law
Jan. 28, 2016, 8:51 PM UTC

Richard Susskind on AI, Book Writing (with his Son) and Expanding into the Mainstream

Monica Bay
Stanford University, CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics

Editor’s note: The author of this post is a fellow at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and is a member of the California bar.

By Monica Bay, Fellow, CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics

For more than 30 years, Richard Susskind has been one of the loudest advocates for changing the way lawyers practice. Since 1987, he has written 10 books on the topic, and shows no sign of stopping.

His main theme has been that the legal profession must reframe its delivery systems to distinguish between “bespoke” work (a British term for hand-tailored suits created to the exact needs of a patron) versus “commodity” work that can be processed via computers or low-level staff. The end goal: for lawyers to provide better, faster, cheaper and more transparent results for clients.

Susskind’s latest book, “The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform The Work of Human Experts,” looks at how technology will affect all professions.

It is his first book co-authored with his son Daniel, a lecturer in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford who previously worked in the British Government (in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and also as a Senior Policy Adviser at the Cabinet Office.)

I asked Richard Susskind five questions by email:

Bay: In your new book, you expand your focus beyond the legal industry, and address other professions: health, education, divinity, law, journalism, management consultant, tax and audit, and architecture. How did you chose those professions, and what was the most important common denominator among them?

Susskind: We wanted to explore a wide range of quite different professions — some mainstream (say, medicine, accounting, law) and some borderline, in the sense that there is some debate over their status as professions (for example, management consulting and journalism — for the record, we are happy that both can sensibly be called professions).

We gravitated towards education because we are both involved as university lecturers and we chose to look at the clergy because it is, historically, one of the oldest and most respected. Together these occupations account for a significant chunk of the professions and we felt were an interesting starting point for what we hope will encourage more and more cross-professional study.

That said, we also looked, but less closely, at many other professions, including the work of actuaries, veterinarians, nurses, dentists and engineers. As for their most important common denominator, it seems to us that professionals are the people we turn to when we are faced with serious problems and situations which we cannot sort out ourselves, because they are beyond our knowledge and experience. Professionals are the custodians and gatekeepers of what we call “practical expertise.”

Bay: What is the most important lesson re: the role of technology in the professions in the next five (or 10) years?

Susskind: The biggest lesson is that we are going to move from an era during which technology systematizes our traditional ways of working, to an era where “increasingly capable machines” (as we call them) will gradually take on more and more of the tasks that used to be the exclusive province of human professions.

We call this the second wave of artificial intelligence — in contrast to the first, which I was involved in the 1980s — when I wrote my doctorate in Oxford on AI and law, and developed a commercially available expert system in law. This move from what we call ‘automation’ to ‘innovation’ will be commonplace in the 2020s.

Bay: What was the biggest surprise as you researched and wrote the book?

Susskind: We started off thinking we were writing a book about the future of the professions. We ended up writing a book about how we produce and distribute expertise in society. It was a challenge to us when we realized that focusing on the professions would be too limiting. More fundamentally, we set about exploring new ways of sorting out the types of problems that, until now, we thought could only be tackled by the traditional professions.

Bay: How did you both decide to write together?

Susskind: I had been thinking for some time that my work on the future of lawyers might have wider application. Certainly, stray doctors, architects and accountants who found themselves at my lectures would rush up afterwards and tell me that the impact of technology I was describing applied in their worlds too.

Meanwhile, Daniel was working as a policy adviser to the U.K. Prime Minister and his experience with health, justice, education and technology policy coincided with mine in consulting. In short, we both had the sense that colossal change was afoot, that technology was beginning fundamentally to transform the professions. And so we thought it would be fun to explore what was actually happening at the vanguard and then write a book that explained the trends.

Bay: What’s next?

Susskind: We are lucky to be receiving invitations from around the world to speak about the book, so we will be on the road, lecturing and, we hope, building enthusiasm for our ideas. Individually, I will be spending a lot of 2016 on helping with our large online courts project in England, while Daniel will continue to think and write about the future of work.

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