Looking at Society Through Professions
Whenever people talk about artificial intelligence, the conversation usually starts with technology. They discuss new models, faster computers, larger datasets or the next breakthrough that may arrive in a year or two. I understand why. Technology is exciting, and it's easy to measure progress when every new version is faster or more capable than the previous one.
But I don't think technology itself tells us very much about the future.
What really matters is how it changes people's lives.
That's why I don't want to spend this article discussing neural networks, GPUs or language models. Those technologies will continue to evolve, but they are only tools. History rarely remembers the tools themselves. Instead, it remembers how those tools changed society.
The steam engine wasn't important because it was an impressive machine. It was important because it transformed transportation, manufacturing and eventually the entire economy. The Internet wasn't revolutionary because computers suddenly became connected. It changed the way people communicate, learn, work and build businesses.
Artificial intelligence should be viewed in exactly the same way.
Instead of asking what AI will be capable of, I think it's much more interesting to ask what people will no longer need to do themselves. That's where the real transformation begins. Every major technological revolution has shifted human effort from one type of work to another. AI won't be an exception.
The easiest way to see that is by looking at professions.
Every profession exists because someone performs a valuable task. Some professions mainly process information. Others create physical products. Some require creativity, while others depend on experience, communication or manual skills. If we examine enough of them, patterns begin to emerge. Eventually, those patterns become much more important than the professions themselves.
I'm not trying to predict which profession will disappear first or which one will survive the longest. In fact, I think that's the wrong question. Every profession will change in some way. Some changes will be dramatic, while others may be barely noticeable for decades. But none of them will remain exactly as they are today.
As we move through these examples, I'd encourage you not to focus too much on the individual profession we're discussing. Try to look for the underlying pattern instead. Accounting, law and medicine may seem completely unrelated today, but I believe they're all moving in the same direction. Once you notice that direction, it's difficult to stop seeing it elsewhere.
Let's start with accounting.
Accounting
I think accounting is one of the easiest professions to begin with because most people already expect it to change. Even before artificial intelligence became popular, accounting software had been gradually automating more and more work. Calculations became automatic, reports were generated in seconds, invoices could be processed electronically and entire workflows that once required hours of manual effort became routine.
Artificial intelligence doesn't change that direction. It accelerates it.
Imagine opening your accounting software a few years from now. Instead of entering invoices manually or searching for the correct tax category, the system already understands what happened. It has analysed your bank transactions, recognised suppliers, identified recurring payments, matched invoices and prepared everything before you even log in. Rather than asking the software to perform individual tasks, you're simply reviewing the final result.
Some people may immediately conclude that accountants will disappear.
I don't think that's what will happen.
At least, not in the way many people imagine.
I don't think that's what will happen. At least, not in the way many people imagine. Whenever a new technology appears, people immediately start asking which professions will disappear first. We asked the same question during the Industrial Revolution, when computers entered offices and when the Internet became part of everyday life. The answer has almost always been more complicated than a simple yes or no.
What usually disappears isn't the profession itself. It's the routine work inside that profession. People gradually stop spending their time on repetitive tasks and begin focusing on decisions, communication and problems that software still can't solve. Artificial intelligence follows exactly the same pattern, but much faster than anything we've seen before.
If you think about the daily work of an accountant today, a surprisingly large part of it is based on processing information. Documents arrive from different places, invoices need to be categorised, transactions have to be matched, reports prepared and regulations checked. None of those tasks are particularly creative. They require precision, consistency and the ability to work with large amounts of structured information. Those are exactly the kinds of problems computers have been getting better at solving for decades.
Artificial intelligence simply pushes that evolution much further. Instead of asking software to perform one task after another, you'll increasingly work with systems that already understand the context. Rather than entering data manually, you'll review conclusions. Instead of searching for mistakes yourself, the system will point them out before you even notice them. The role slowly shifts from performing the work to supervising the result.
I don't think this change will happen overnight. Every country has different tax laws, different reporting requirements and different legal responsibilities. Businesses won't suddenly replace experienced accountants with artificial intelligence simply because a new model has appeared. Trust takes time to build, especially when financial responsibility is involved.
But if we stop looking at the next two or three years and instead think about the next twenty or thirty, the direction becomes much clearer. Every improvement removes another small piece of routine work. One year the software prepares invoices automatically. A few years later it understands contracts. Then it begins analysing unusual transactions, suggesting tax optimisations and identifying potential risks before anyone asks. None of those individual improvements seem revolutionary on their own, but together they gradually redefine what an accountant actually does.
Eventually, I think something even more interesting happens. Businesses stop hiring accountants primarily to process documents. They hire them because they need someone who understands finance, can explain complex situations, make difficult decisions and take legal responsibility when necessary. In other words, the value shifts away from processing information and towards applying judgement.
That's an important distinction because I don't believe artificial intelligence is replacing knowledge alone. It's replacing routine access to knowledge. Those are two very different things. Knowing the tax code is valuable, but understanding when one exception matters more than another, or how a particular decision affects an entire business, is something completely different.
However, even that may not be the final destination.
If we continue following this idea far enough into the future, we eventually reach a point where artificial intelligence doesn't simply assist accountants. It becomes capable of understanding regulations, analysing business activity, communicating with government systems and preparing everything automatically. At that stage, accounting may become almost invisible for most companies. It simply happens in the background, the same way cloud storage or internet connections have become invisible parts of our daily work today.
Whether that happens in twenty years or a hundred years isn't really the important question. The important question is whether the direction has already been established.
I believe it has.
And once I realised that, I started asking myself the same question about every other profession.
What if accounting isn't special?
What if the same pattern appears everywhere?
That's exactly why I'd like to continue with another profession that seems completely different at first glance.
Let's look at lawyers.
Law
At first glance, law seems completely different from accounting. It's difficult to imagine artificial intelligence replacing a lawyer. The legal profession isn't just about documents or regulations. It involves negotiation, interpretation, strategy and responsibility. Every case is different, every client has a unique situation and sometimes a single sentence can completely change the outcome of an agreement.
For exactly those reasons, many people assume that lawyers will always be needed. And I agree with that—but only up to a point.
The real question isn't whether lawyers will disappear. The real question is how much of their current work actually requires a lawyer.
If we look honestly at how legal services work today, a surprisingly large amount of time isn't spent standing in court or negotiating complex contracts. It's spent searching through legislation, reading previous cases, comparing documents, checking compliance, preparing contracts and answering questions that have already been answered hundreds or even thousands of times before.
Those activities are based almost entirely on information. They require accuracy, consistency and access to an enormous amount of legal knowledge. In other words, they're exactly the type of work artificial intelligence is becoming better at every year.
Imagine you're starting a new company. Instead of scheduling several meetings with a lawyer just to prepare the basic documents, an AI system already understands your business, your country, the applicable legislation and the type of company you're creating. It prepares the necessary documents, explains every clause in plain language, points out possible risks and even suggests alternatives depending on your situation. A lawyer still reviews everything before it's final, but instead of spending hours preparing standard documents, they're reviewing work that has already been completed.
That's a very different way of working.
And once again, I don't think this change happens because lawyers suddenly become unnecessary. It happens because the repetitive part of their work continues shrinking, allowing them to spend more time on situations where human judgement really matters.
We've seen this pattern before. Years ago, searching through legal databases manually was considered normal. Today, search engines and specialised software do most of that work in seconds. Artificial intelligence is simply the next step. Instead of finding information, it begins understanding relationships between different laws, previous decisions and the specific circumstances of a case.
Of course, there will always be situations where two experienced lawyers disagree, even after reading exactly the same legislation. Law isn't mathematics. Many legal questions don't have a single correct answer, and that's one of the reasons why I don't believe AI will completely replace the legal profession any time soon.
However, that's also why I think the profession itself will become even more valuable. If artificial intelligence can handle ninety percent of routine legal work, lawyers will spend much more of their time doing what only they can do—building strategy, negotiating, representing clients and making difficult decisions where there isn't an obvious answer.
But once again, I find myself asking exactly the same question that I asked when thinking about accounting.
What happens if we stop thinking about the next ten years?
What happens if we think about the next hundred?
It's difficult to imagine today's legal systems remaining exactly as they are. Society changes. Technology changes. Businesses change. Governments change. It would actually be surprising if the legal profession didn't change as well.
Perhaps one day governments themselves will rely on artificial intelligence to analyse legislation before it's adopted. Perhaps regulations will become much clearer because they are written not only for people but also for intelligent systems that need to interpret them consistently. Perhaps legal disputes will decrease because contracts become far more precise and easier to understand from the very beginning.
I don't know whether those things will happen.
But I no longer dismiss them simply because they sound unrealistic today.
A few years ago, I would have dismissed many of the things AI already does today. That experience changed the way I evaluate the future. Instead of asking whether something seems impossible, I ask whether the direction already exists.
And when I look at law, I think it does.
The technology isn't replacing lawyers. It's gradually removing the work that requires searching, comparing, reading and processing information. The more that happens, the more lawyers become advisers, strategists and decision-makers rather than people who spend their days looking for information that a machine can now retrieve in seconds.
At this point, something started bothering me.
Accounting depends heavily on information.
Law depends heavily on information.
Both professions seemed to be moving in exactly the same direction.
So I asked myself another question.
What about medicine?
Medicine
Medicine is probably one of the professions people mention most often when discussing artificial intelligence. Some believe doctors will eventually disappear. Others believe AI should never be trusted with human health under any circumstances.
Personally, I don't think either of those extreme opinions is correct.
Medicine is far too complex to be reduced to a simple prediction. Doctors don't just diagnose illnesses. They speak with patients, make decisions under uncertainty, explain treatment options, respond to unexpected complications and carry responsibility for every decision they make. None of that disappears simply because computers become better at analysing medical information.
At the same time, medicine is also one of the most knowledge-intensive professions in the world. Thousands of new scientific papers are published every single week. New treatments appear constantly. Clinical guidelines change. No individual doctor is capable of reading everything that becomes available.
Artificial intelligence doesn't get tired.
It doesn't forget what it has already read.
And it can compare enormous amounts of medical information in seconds.
For me, that's where the real opportunity begins.
Imagine a doctor seeing twenty or thirty patients in a single day. Every patient arrives with a different medical history, different symptoms, different medications and different risks. On top of that, new research is published every day. Even the most experienced specialist simply cannot keep every new discovery in their head. That isn't a criticism of doctors. It's a limitation of being human.
Artificial intelligence doesn't have that limitation. It can analyse thousands of research papers, compare treatment guidelines from different countries, recognise patterns across millions of cases and present possible diagnoses almost instantly. That doesn't mean it's always right, but it does mean it can become an incredibly powerful assistant.
If I were a doctor, I wouldn't see AI as my replacement. I'd see it as another specialist sitting in the room with me—one that has read almost every published paper, never gets tired and can search through an enormous amount of information in a matter of seconds. The final decision would still belong to me, but my decision would be supported by far more information than I could ever process on my own.
I actually think that's how many professions will evolve. Artificial intelligence won't suddenly replace experienced professionals. Instead, it will allow one person to perform work that previously required an entire team. The technology becomes another member of that team, handling the parts that involve processing information while people focus on understanding the situation, communicating with others and making decisions.
Over time, patients will probably begin using AI long before they visit a doctor. Instead of searching random websites and reading contradictory advice, they'll describe their symptoms to systems capable of asking follow-up questions, reviewing their medical history, interpreting laboratory results and estimating how urgent the situation might be. Sometimes the conclusion will simply be, "You don't need to see a doctor. Rest for a few days." Other times the recommendation may be exactly the opposite: "Go to the emergency department immediately."
I don't think that sounds unrealistic anymore. In fact, we're already seeing the first steps in that direction. The systems available today are still far from perfect, but that's exactly the point. We're looking at the beginning of the journey, not the end.
Eventually, routine consultations may become almost completely automated. A patient describes their symptoms, wearable devices provide continuous health data, previous medical records are analysed automatically and the system prepares a complete summary before the doctor even enters the room. Instead of spending valuable appointment time collecting basic information, the conversation begins with diagnosis, treatment and discussion.
That alone could completely change healthcare.
Doctors would spend less time typing notes into computer systems and more time doing what patients actually need—listening, explaining, reassuring and making difficult medical decisions. Ironically, as technology becomes more advanced, the human side of medicine may become even more important than it is today.
And that's something I've noticed several times already while thinking about these different professions.
The routine work keeps moving towards artificial intelligence.
The human work keeps moving towards people.
At first, I thought this pattern applied only to a few information-based professions like accounting or law. But after looking at medicine, I realised it was much broader than that. The same direction kept appearing again and again, even in professions that seemed completely different from one another.
That's when I stopped thinking about individual jobs and started thinking about society as a whole.
If accounting changes this way, if law changes this way and if medicine changes this way, then perhaps we're asking the wrong question. Instead of wondering which profession artificial intelligence will replace next, maybe we should be asking something much bigger.
What happens when almost every profession begins moving in the same direction?
That question stayed with me for a long time because it forces us to think beyond individual careers. It isn't just about accountants, lawyers or doctors anymore. It's about the role work itself plays in our lives. For centuries, society has been organised around the assumption that people exchange their time and knowledge for money. Every improvement in technology has changed how we work, but not why we work.
Artificial intelligence may become the first technology that seriously challenges that assumption.
I'm not saying work will disappear. I don't believe that at all. Human beings will always find new problems to solve, new businesses to create and new ambitions to pursue. What I am saying is that the kind of work we spend most of our time doing may look completely different from what we consider normal today.
When machines take over routine tasks, our value gradually shifts somewhere else. It shifts towards creativity, responsibility, leadership, relationships, curiosity and imagination—qualities that are much harder to automate because they depend on being human rather than simply processing information.
The more I thought about this, the more I realised that information-based professions were only the beginning. If this pattern continues, it won't stop with offices. Eventually, it will reach factories, transportation, retail, restaurants, entertainment and almost every other part of everyday life.
And that's where the picture starts becoming much bigger than artificial intelligence itself.
Because once the same direction appears everywhere, we are no longer talking about changes to individual professions.
We're talking about a transformation of society.
To understand that transformation, I think we need to leave offices behind for a moment and look at something completely different.
Let's talk about physical products.