Automating the Professions

In her latest Washington Post column Megan McArdle muses on what will happen when automation begins to supplant professionals’ jobs. After noting that she continues to believe that free trade and increased automation are the correct prescriptions she goes on:

But as artificial intelligence starts coming for our jobs, I wonder how well the professional class will take its own medicine. Will we gracefully transition to lower-skilled service work, as we urged manufacturing workers to do? Or will we fight like hell to retain what we have, for our children as well as ourselves?

My prediction is that professionals will go through the Five Stages of Grief. It may be that has already begun and they’re in the denial stage.

My prescription on the other hand is that professional education needs to change with the times, both in how prospective professionals are selected and what they’re expected to do.

A number of other observations occur to me. I wonder how Megan squares this:

As we entered the electorate, it became a major force in our politics, as the Clintons tried to steer the economy toward a global, postindustrial future.

with the fact that there was a sharp upswing in immigration, almost entirely of low-skill workers whose jobs could easily be performed via automation, during the Clinton years? Different Clinton policies were working at cross-purposes? Or that much of Washington Consensus policy was either wrong or inconsistently applied?

My second observation is that I suspect that generative artificial intelligence will replace the lowest cost entry level “professional” jobs first which is almost entirely backwards. As I have pointed out any number of times junior engineers become senior engineers. When you cut off the paths to becoming a junior engineer whether by offshoring or automation, it will inevitably lead to no senior engineers eventually.

The sad reality is that some of the things that can actually be done better by algorithms, e.g. a lot of what lawyers do and some of the things that physicians do, e.g. diagnosis based on clinical findings but that lawyers and doctors have the political clout to prevent their jobs being taken over by machines. The comparison I would make is to occupational licensing. It’s one way of preventing your job from being offshored.