Two years ago I wrote a book called The Displacement Dilemma. The argument was that we are automating precisely the work through which people used to become experts: the trainee seat, the first-year grind, the studio crit. Nobody is competing with the surgeon. They are competing with the person who was going to become one.
The fair criticism of the first edition was that it was mostly me. So the second one is built on other people.
Sixteen voices, most of whom disagree with me about something. A commercial technology lawyer who thinks we are sleepwalking into a social problem. A GP who says a clinical note is a record of a doctor’s thinking rather than a transcript of what was said. A radiologist who was told in 2016 to stop training radiologists and is now short of them everywhere. An architect who does not accept my thesis at all in his own profession and said so, which made the book better and me more careful. A recruiter, a psychotherapist, a designer, a turnaround adviser, a professor of AI, and an audit partner who thinks the whole worry is overblown.
The disagreements turned out to be the best part of it.
Out on 30 September 2026. The subtitle has been shortened from Navigating The Survival of Human Expertise in an AI-Driven World to How Human Expertise Survives an AI-Driven World, which is the same claim with rather less throat-clearing in front of it.
There are two evenings attached to it, and everyone is welcome at both. The launch is at Kingsley Napley in London on Thursday 22 October at six: luma.com/328ekvvr. Then on Wednesday 11 November, also at six, there is a panel at the House of Lords called The Missing Rung, on what AI is doing to the first rung of a professional career, hosted by Lord Clement-Jones: luma.com/5ddtca3i.
Wisdom is just time multiplied by mistakes. AI is removing the chance to make them.
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