Quotes About Evolution

But people keep outgrowing their outgrowing

We are advancing into a post-professional society.

The deeper issue here is that any changes in the work that people do tend to originate at the level of particular tasks involved, and not with the job in general terms.

It is interesting to note, harking back again to the exponential growth of information technology, that the hardware on which Watson ran in 2011 was said to be about the size of the average bedroom. Today, we are told, it runs on a machine that is the size of three pizza boxes, and by the early 2020s Watson will sit comfortably in a smartphone.

The Canadian science-fiction writer William Gibson could well have been speaking of technology in the professions when he said: '[t]he future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

Technology will be the main driver of this change. And, in the long run, we will neither need nor want professionals to work in the way that they did in the twentieth century and before.

The end of the professional era is characterized by four trends: the move from bespoke service; the bypassing of traditional gatekeepers; a shift from a reactive to a proactive approach to professional work; and the more-for-less challenge.

We also see intra-professional friction, when, for example, nurses take on work that used to be exclusive to doctors, or paralegals are engaged to perform tasks that formerly were the province of lawyers.

This is a new division of labour, and traditional professionals sometimes struggle here because they are no longer in the driving-seat.

This automation therefore complements but does not fundamentally change the central way in which services are delivered.

However, as Chapter 2 shows, there is a new generation of machine in action now, and these are systems (much more of which in Chapter 4) that can replace parts of, and sometimes all of, certain kinds of professional work.

There will be very few jobs for life, much less security, and very little predictability. There will be an emphasis instead on being able to learn, develop, and adapt rapidly as new roles and tasks arise. Different ways of communicating Not many decades ago professionals communicated in three ways—face-to-face, in writing, and by telephone. That was it.

Lighter laptops followed (our first one had a 10mb hard disk; today one of our laptops, at about one-third of the weight, has flash storage of 1 terabyte—100,000 times larger in thirty years).

As Voltaire would caution, in reforming or transforming the professions, we should not let the best be the enemy of the good.

Readers may call us radical, but if we can foresee a day when the average laptop has more processing power than all of humanity combined, then it might be time for professionals to revisit some of their current working practices.

As late as 2000, Cukier and Mayer-Schönberger note, only 25 per cent of the world's stored information was in a digital form. Today that proportion is 98 per cent.5

there be different and better ways of producing knowledge and making it available in society, methods that might not directly involve the traditional professions at all?

El futuro del servicio jurídico no son Grisham ni Rumpole, (1) ni sus pelucas, sus salas de audiencias recubiertas de madera, sus volúmenes forrados en cuero o su argot jurídico arcaico. Ni siquiera es ya hoy dominante el modelo de abogacía concebido como un servicio de asesoría profesional individualizada, desempeñada por abogados que reciben a sus clientes en sus despachos, ya sean esplendorosos o polvorientos, y ofrecen su orientación jurídica a medida.

todos los Abogados —salvo los que se retiren el día de hoy— son, en realidad, el Abogado del mañana.

Las instituciones tienden a intentar preservar el problema para el cual son la solución. CLAY SHIRKY

A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts." Ramana Maharshi

Try to see the past as a room separate from the one you live in now. You can go in there, but you don't live there anymore.

I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals.

The weight of our guts is estimated at about 60 percent of what is expected for a primate of our size: the human digestive system as a whole is much smaller than would be predicted on the basis of size relations in primates. Our small mouths, teeth, and guts fit well with the softness, high caloric density, low fiber content, and high digestibility of cooked food.