**3. Second crossroads: future of professional work**

Although the future of humanity has been analyzed on the basis of various areas and concerns, its themes tend to be related to the economic basis of societies and their modes of political organization. The intersections between these two dimensions originate different ideas about how future societies will be, imagining them as an egalitarian world with abundance; one with abundance, but with a hierarchical order; on the contrary, as an egalitarian world, but with scarcity; or as a hierarchical one, also with scarcity [16]. Evidently, all these possibilities harbor ideological nuances and different possibilities, with some scenarios more favorable than others. In all these analyses, paid work continues to be a permanent element and articulator of everyday life, even when there is consensus regarding the present and future transformations of the world of work.

So far, analyses on the future of paid work have focused mainly on two perspectives. One that predicts the gradual obsolescence of humanity in the world of work, and the other that suggests the complementarity between human labor and that of artificial intelligence. Those who predict obsolescence of humanity in the world of work assume that rapid technological evolution will gradually replace people, even in those tasks currently perceived as exclusively human because they involve abstract thinking and relational skills. According to such approaches, these capabilities could be developed by technological devices in which the thinking mechanisms of an average human being have been developed [17]. Therefore, higher education should be focused on preparing professionals to provide such devices with these capabilities. According to this view, in the future some professions will be more relevant than others, reordering the socio-professional pyramid with which different countries value them. On the other hand, those who propose that technological progress will substitute only some labor functions argue that human skills related to originality, fluency of ideas, deductive reasoning, sensitivity to problems, or critical mentality are not replaceable by artificial intelligence and will be complemented by the capabilities that have been transferred to it, increasing labor productivity [18]. There will be, therefore, no human obsolescence in the world of work, but rather complementarity between human and artificial intelligence. Both positions recognize that the automation of some labor functions will require the development of new human skills at work.

Transformations in the world of work will also be reflected in professional work, and there are three different positions. One of them corresponds to the "continuity thesis" [19, 20], which argues that professionals have social, cultural and symbolic capitals that will allow them to adapt to the changing world of work and preserve their expert status using multidisciplinary perspectives to contribute knowledge to a highly complex and rapidly changing environment. In contrast to this, the advent of a post-professional society [21–24] in an internet-based digital society would cause profound changes in the distribution of knowledge in the population, which would increasingly rely on practical knowledge, available online, to solve everyday situations. Thus, increasingly informed people would require less and less professional services, since the development of technological devices capable of self-operation – or that do not require specialists – would be on the rise. A third perspective suggests that there is not sufficient background to argue that professional work will be negatively affected in the future by the inclusion of technologies in the world of

work, and so the theses of continuity and the post-professional society are merely dystopian or retrotopian lucubrations. That is, in the sense proposed by Bauman [25], retrotopias consist of the yearning to improve the current human situation, transferring past potentialities to the present, in a nostalgic vision for a past valued for its presumed stability and also for its supposed reliability [25]. However, even if there are not enough arguments to support one or the other position, certain current trends in professional work may continue or be exacerbated in the future. Such propensities correspond to the fact that: 1) labor sources may demand that professionals provide more services, with fewer resources at their disposal; 2) demand for new competencies beyond the traditional boundaries of the professions, therefore, may expand their professional jurisdictions; 3) the standardization of possible ways of performing certain tasks may not necessarily consider contextual redesigns; 4) the decomposition of professional work into different parts may be handled by different types of professionals, by non-professionals, or become automated; and 5) the routinization of professional labors, which until now had been particularly complex, may become commonplace [26, 27].

So, in any case, there is consensus that professional work will undergo changes in the future; therefore, higher education should focus on creating professional profiles capable of adapting to the new times. Whether we nominate them as symbolic analysts [28], self-programmable professionals [29], knowledge workers [30], or "knowmads" [31] education should prepare professionals that are mobile; that, more than people with disciplinary ascriptions or institutions, are nodes of a network, and thus add value to their jobs; and that are able to innovate, to handle sophisticated information, and to transfer knowledge [32].

Given the advance of technologies in professional tasks, all the changes in the future of professional work are at a crossroads with the implications that the massification, fragmentation and segmentation of higher education in Latin America have had on choices and the type of education received.

On the one hand, the massification of higher education represents an opportunity to raise the levels of knowledge available to citizens in general, broadening possibilities for social influence and opening perspectives for making conscious and informed choices. The fact that many more people have access to higher education should mean greater opportunities for personal development as well as for the environments in which they live. However, such massification in Latin America is associated with the fragmentation and segmentation of higher education.

The fragmentation of higher education entails a relevant tension for professional training – the most operative dimensions of the fragmented professions have been transferred to the education offered in professional institutes; and, at the same time, particularities of this latter type of training are transferred to the education offered in technical training centers. Although not in all cases, the same business consortia own both universities and professional institutes and technical training centers; thus, students follow a long ascending path from obtaining a technical degree, through a professional degree, to a bachelor's degree in a university, culminating an education that in total has been equivalent in time, and more costly in economic resources, than what is involved in the study of a university profession that includes a professional degree and the corresponding bachelor's degree. This type of educational path is usually followed by people from the most disadvantaged socioeconomic strata, who have seen higher education as a possibility of social mobility, and who have had access through debt, or by studying in evening classes after their working days, as a way of paying for their studies. However, the segmentation of higher education in Latin America operates at all educational levels, so there is no certainty as to the returns that such educational trajectories can bring to

#### *Crossroads of Higher Education in Troubled Times Facing the Future of Work and the Subjective… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99999*

those who have followed them. Hence, the transfer of the most operational tasks to artificial intelligence devices represents a crossroads for higher education.

The advance of artificial intelligence in the development of the most operative professional tasks raises questions regarding the future of those who opt for higher education, referring not only to whether artificial intelligence will replace the work of those who have been trained in professional institutes, and whether it will also replace that of those who have studied in technical training centers. It also raises the question of whether this would mean the end of the fragmentation of higher education, and thus exacerbate competition for jobs by increasing "credentialism", understood as the availability in the labor market of an increasing number of applicants with higher and higher certifications, which causes a "sort of pyramid of credentials" ([33]: 232). In other words, as artificial intelligence replaces the most operative professional tasks, in order to be more competitive in the labor market, professionals would have to climb to higher and higher degrees, leaving professional degrees at the bottom of the pyramid and doctorates at the top.

Whatever the perspective with which the future of professional work is approached, the massification, fragmentation and segmentation of higher education, and the five current trends of professional work enunciated by Susskind and Susskind [26, 27] pointed out previously, evidence the crossroads of higher education in the face of the future of professional work, and therefore, the need for visionary strategies that allow facing the coming changes in education and in the future of professional work.
