03/06/2026
Richard Susskind has a name for something I notice in surveying conversations.
He calls it not-us thinking.
In his book How to Think About AI, he describes a pattern most of us will recognise. Ask a professional whether AI will transform other industries, and they agree without hesitation. Ask whether it will reshape their own work, and the shutters come down. Their field is different. Their judgement is too hard-won for a machine to touch.
It is a comfortable place to stand, and it is the exact position Susskind warns about.
Think about the London cabbie. To earn the badge, a driver spends three to four years memorising 25,000 streets and the routes between them, with no satnav allowed. That depth was the whole moat. It was the thing nobody believed a machine could replicate.
Then the satnav arrived. It had not learned a single street, and it still delivered the one thing the passenger wanted, which was to get there.
Then Uber arrived, and the streets were beside the point. The whole market reorganised around price, the app in your pocket, and what passengers were now willing to accept.
That is the part not-us thinking misses. It is rarely a single tool that reshapes a profession. It is the tool, alongside the shift in what clients expect, what they will pay, and what they will tolerate.
The expertise a surveyor builds over years is our version of The Knowledge, and we tell ourselves it cannot be touched. What the client actually wants, though, is certainty before the largest purchase of their life, and a clear read on the risks they cannot see for themselves.
I think that whether AI replaces the surveyor is the wrong question to feel safe behind. What happens next will vary by specialism, by client demand, by pricing, by regulation, and by behaviour.
You most exposed when you assume the change is meant for everyone else and my motto in life is never assume.
Are you doing your own not-us thinking?
