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Generative AI and the challenge for professionalism

We are rapidly getting to a point where GAI tools can replicate some of the functions over which professionals once had unchallenged dominance. They might not be able to do it with the same skill, responsiveness or adaptability that professionals can. But they are cheap, at least once up and running, which is going to be even more important to bureaucracies if the recurrent economic shocks of the last two years are a sign of what the future will look like.

This could lead to the replacement of professionals by automated systems, or offering of services where little to none were previously available. I suspect it’s more likely to lead to a rationing of services, using automated systems to triage and deal with routine cases while reserving a (shrinking) cadre of professionals for non-routine interaction. Meanwhile those who can pay will be able to access human expertise, possibly GAI-enthused in purposeful and service-improving ways, without having to fight their way through a bureaucracy to get there.

I’m preoccupied by how professionals can work with rather than against automation. Is it possible to head off this threat by finding ways to use GAI which expands the agency of professionals, using it in ways informed by and realising professional values, rather than insisting on the inviolability of professional autonomy while the political economy of automation within bureaucracies rapidly erodes the conditions which make that autonomy possible? The threat here is from the social organisation of the professions under capitalism, how the technology is received under those conditions, rather than from the technology itself.

Take therapy for instance. How could a therapist use GAI to produce automated agents which work with clients between session? It could be given notes on a weekly basis detailing what it should focus on before returning back to the therapist with feedback to help them prepare for a weekly session. The weekly session of a fixed length reflects the economic organisation of the profession more than it does a reflective judgement about effective intervention. GAI affords the capacity to extend what the professional can do within those limits of social organisation, in ways which are infused by and seek to realise the values underpinning their practice.

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