Revitalizing the Professions in an Era of Automation
Automation can be designed to complement human work and vocations, or to substitute for the humans now holding those positions. At present, the dominant trend is toward substitution. While often characterized as a dictate of economics, substitutive automation also results from a culture premised on a certain model of the self as a bundle of inputs (data collection), algorithmic processes (data analysis), and outputs (data use). This pattern-recognizing, algorithmic self is no more (nor less) than the resources and services it uses and creates. As “human resources,” it is simply raw material to be deployed to its most profitable use.
Audit culture, quantification (e.g., the quantified self), commensuration, and cost-benefit analysis all reflect and reinforce algorithmic selfhood. While anodyne instances of the trend (e.g., the behavioral economics of nudge) appear as little more than incremental extensions of neoliberalism, the accelerating pace of monitoring and manipulation suggests a critical mass of social control ripe for resistance. But this resistance (hopefully embodied in political economy as a program of complementary, human-respecting rather than human-replacing automation) has to be premised on a more robust conception of vocation (and self-interpretation) than presently prevails.
The status of certain forms of work as professions may provide one template for resistance. In medicine, law, education, and information retrieval, professionalism provides a “third logic” beyond market and state to inform the development of humane labor policy and public service. The question now is whether automation will continue to deskill and devalue the leading professionals in those fields, or whether they will resist by reaffirming their own professional norms and extending professional status to other workers in their fields.
Bio: Frank Pasquale is a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland. His research addresses the challenges posed to information law by rapidly changing technology, particularly in the health care, internet, and finance industries. He is a member of the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society, and an Affiliate Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. He frequently presents on the ethical, legal, and social implications of information technology for attorneys, physicians, and other health professionals. His book The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015) develops a social theory of reputation, search, and finance.