Apr 15, 2017 6 min read

Over the past several decades, my live has changed. I now seem to know much more about matters that directly affect me and have a willingness to act on that knowledge. Twenty years ago, I would have left such decisions to the experts. Ten years ago, I would have searched the internet for information, but would not have acted. Today, I am often willing to challenge the experts.

Before seeing my physician, I wade through articles and blogs so that I can provide alternatives to her diagnosis and impress her with my knowledge of medicine. I attempt to argue with my brother, a certified public accountant, on how to save money on my taxes. Likewise, I am always attempting to challenge plumbers, electricians, gardening experts and those who make their living in appliance repair, even though replacing a light bulb can be a task for me. Without training or experience in many vocations, I seek to make my opinion known and sometimes dare to follow it against expert advice.

The American political landscape has also seen a demise of expertise. When President Trump campaigned on “draining the swamp” last year to his base of populist voters, this meant terminating thousands of government jobs held by professionals with vast amounts of knowledge and experience. Government workers in all areas, from diplomats to climate scientists, are now unemployed.

Trump has put an exclamation point on his dislike for governmental expertise by refusing to fill 533 key executive branch positions. As Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, points out in his excellent new study, “The Death of Expertise,” “Donald Trump ran a one-man campaign against established knowledge.” As president, he is now in a position to turn the full force of the White House on reality itself.

Of course, what has changed is not me, but the availability of the internet. What has changed in our democracy is a populist disdain for experts who tell us what to do. Who needs a climate expert in the Environmental Protection Agency when there are thousands of opinions a click away? The great globalization of knowledge and communication has turned many of us, including global political leaders, into experts in areas where we have no training or experience.

As time goes by, individuals and governments will learn that the opinions of experts are important. Hopefully this will happen before I flood the basement while attempting to fix a pipe, or before the Trump administration wades into an international crisis that could have been avoided.

And there is a new attack on expertise on the horizon that will provide a greater challenge. I am referring to “big data” and artificial intelligence.

Big data has been defined as “extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends and associations, especially related to human behavior and interactions. Artificial intelligence is understood as “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, including decision making.”

As these two concepts are improved and better understood, the implications for many of our professions are enormous. The practices of law, medicine, accounting, teaching, journalism, therapy and others will change, and may dramatically shift decision-making from trained experts to the individual.

Consider the practice of law. Big data makes it possible to review and analyze every judicial opinion in the history of American jurisprudence. Artificial intelligence will soon have the capacity to draw conclusions on the outcome of legal matters based on how all prior cases were decided, the judge who decided each opinion, counsel who were involved in each case and a host of other factors. If this capability were for sale to the public, how would it affect the need to hire an attorney? Would a divorcing couple who could spend $1,000 to learn the most likely result in dividing their property and reordering their lives find it necessary to retain legal advice?

Big data is already having an effect on psychology. According to the April issue of The Atlantic, researchers at Brigham Young University have developed psychotherapy metrics, drawing on historical data from thousands of cases, to create algorithms predicting when clients are at risk of mental deterioration. By having clients take simple surveys, therapists using this tool claim great success in preventing relapses into drug use, suicide and other mental-health crises. As these algorithms become perfected, what is to prevent them from being monetized and from family members deploying them to determine when a psychiatrist is necessary?

The teaching and journalism professions have their own unique set of problems. Many young students already view teachers as hired help and themselves as consumers of a high-priced product. This leads to them being catered to. Online colleges have begun to remove hands-on teaching from the equation. The availability of big data and artificial intelligence could lead many students who are “confident but dumb” to strike out on their own. Qualified or not, they will ask themselves, “If the founder of Facebook could do it, why not me?”

Journalism faces the toughest task of all. Courtesy of the funnels we establish through social media, we have our own sets of facts, opinions and conclusions. Before long, we will be able to use big data to find some algorithm that supports our facts, and artificial intelligence that supports our conclusions. The further decline of print media and unbiased reporting seems assured.

Will technological advances combined with the internet transform us into a society of polymaths, each of us knowing enough to solve all daily problems without consulting someone with training and experience? I doubt it. The professions I have discussed will not go the way of travel agents, realtors and mortgage facilitators. Those professions have been downsized, but still exist and provide valuable niche services in their brick-and-mortar form. The human factor in analyzing data for professional services will never be replaced.

In the end, both advances will make us healthier and more secure.

Those of us who insist on ignoring expertise and seeking our own solutions, based on technological “CliffsNotes,” will ultimately fail. Better to trust our health and our bank accounts to those experts who learn the tools of the trade, and put them to work alongside the new advances in gathering and interpreting information.

Gary Stout is a Washington attorney.