Is the future threat of automation to the professions real? The helping professions as case studies

The automation of work has been a normal process over millennia, changing work practices both to alleviate stress and strain on the individual worker and also to affect the employability of those individuals, changing the patterns of jobs and their availability in major ways. The emergence of robotics has been seen to extend the threats to future employment across ever wider sections of the community, but there has been, until recently, a belief that the professions, with a requirement for essential intellectual and emotional skills, are immune from such threats. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence, and in particular machine learning, has, however, begun to be seen as a looming threat to many professions. Law and accountancy have already been affected and there is a realisation that the simulation of processes which underlie human performance, and not the exact replacement of those processes, may mean that large areas of the professions may be affected in the near future. This paper examines the availability of automated processes to replace the processes of assessment, intervention, evaluation and decision making which are undertaken by members of the helping professions, including psychologists, counsellors and other allied health professionals, with implications for future employment in those fields. The analysis extends to a critical examination of the need for intuition and empathy while working as a helping professional. The training of future professionals in the near term and for the education of the community to understand those implications are considered. The substitution of robots can be considered as potentially providing, in many cases, better service to the community than that provided by humans. The coming threat of the robot psychologist isreal.