We’ve seen this before. Scribes in medieval Europe once held monopoly power over the written word — until Gutenberg’s press flattened that hierarchy. Textile artisans were once the pride of cities — until industrial looms made their mastery irrelevant. In the 20th century, travel agents, typists, and retail stockbrokers all watched their professional stature — and compensation — collapse under the weight of software.
The common thread: when a profession’s value is based on exclusive access to codified knowledge or repeatable process, it is vulnerable. Prestige does not protect it. In fact, prestige often signals just how close that profession is to being automated. Once something becomes teachable, it becomes learnable by machines. Once it becomes learnable, it becomes replaceable.
The High-Skill Trap
Today’s most exalted professions — medicine, law, consulting, engineering, high finance — are all deeply codified. They’ve spent decades standardizing best practices, benchmarking performance, and reducing errors through systematic frameworks. Ironically, it is that very systematization that now makes them vulnerable.
Consider law. Allen & Overy, a Magic Circle law firm, recently began integrating Harvey, an AI platform built on OpenAI’s GPT-4, into its global operations. Harvey can draft memos, summarize documents, and perform legal research with astonishing speed. Tasks that once justified armies of junior associates are being absorbed by machines. Kira Systems and Luminance now dominate the contract review space, using machine learning to flag anomalies and suggest edits faster than any human team.
In medicine, Google’s Med-PaLM 2 is being tested in clinical settings to answer open-ended medical questions with high levels of accuracy. The story is similar at the Mayo Clinic, where the role of the radiologist is shifting from sole interpreter to a partner with an AI that can ‘see the unseen.’ As their own magazine details, these systems can detect subtle, early-stage disease patterns in scans that are often invisible to the human eye, fundamentally enhancing — and altering — the diagnostic process. Babylon Health has deployed diagnostic AI chatbots that have handled millions of patient interactions — displacing the routine diagnostic work that once occupied a vast portion of a GP’s day.
