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Susskind can be guaranteed to make the profession respond negatively, and with reason because he has not been particularly prescient to date. His hyperbole does not make him a commentator who inspires confidence.
However there will come a moment when he gets it right. When I signed my articles approx 35 years ago I recall the receptionist who was a dab hand at drawing plans on parchment for sewing into the conveyance, followed by the secretary in charge of the roneo machine for producing standard letters: the rise and demise of the fax machine and the first typewriter which had a memory, and could produce a couple of standard clauses, after a combination of four separate keystrokes: and the agonising over buying our first server to connect typewriters together and deciding how many megabytes of memory we could afford ( a single gigabyte would probably have cost us our annual profit!)
Time moves on and at an increasingly fast pace. I certainly saw massive technological advances and I am sure that there will be more rapid advances in the near future. How many of the commentators above considered ( or more to the point had actually heard of) a job as "web designer" or "search engine optimiser".
I think the agonising over whether we are part of a "profession" or an "industry" is largely irrelevant. Solicitors make it what it is, and that will depend to a large extent on how we use technology.
Artificial Intelligence may not be the answer but I can guarantee that within the next five years there will be technology being used in high street practices that we have not even heard of today.
Having read many of the comments on Gazette articles for sometime now I don't expect much support for what I say, but I do believe that we all need to open our eyes to what is happening in the world of technology
RMW