Richard Susskind’s new book How to Think About AI has a warning for professionals:

Professionals see much greater scope for AI in disciplines other than their own. Doctors are quick to suggest that AI has great potential in law, accounting and architecture, but instinctively they tend to resist its deployment in health care. Lawyers assert confidently that audit, journalism and management consulting are ripe for displacement but offer special pleadings on its very limited suitability in the practice of law and the administration of justice.

Talking about AI requires a new vocabulary. For example, AI skeptics are fond of saying that computers can never replace them because they don’t have the same judgment, empathy and creativity. 

What’s overlooked is that computers can provide what we might call quasi-judgment, quasi-empathy and quasi-creativity. Susskind demonstrates — quite convincingly — that the computer versions of these biological traits can be superior in several ways to the human version. Skeptical about this? All I can say is check out Chapter 5 before becoming too confident that you are irreplaceable.

A complete review of How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed is available at LLRX.com.