I’d like to know more what you have in mind. My initial response would be that technology, in general, means “tools with chips.”

An old form of the Hippocratic Oath said the physician would not “cut for stone” (try to remove gallstones) since that required specialized skill–one origin of surgery, maybe, and aligning with the “limit of competence” in the list above.

Perhaps that’s technique rather than technology. Today, you’ve got intelligent tools like the gamma knife; the surgeon still needs to keep up her professional knowledge, and still needs to listen to the whole patient.

Or, in areas like electronic patient records, the technology can reduce error and empower the individual. I read just this weekend about efforts to give individuals more control over their medical records, something that an occasionally paternalistic profession might have trouble with.

The connection: in the same way that medicine is moving from something done to you to something you manage for yourself, so too professional learning is becoming the way that you take charge of your own growth, not an endless sequence of “contact hours,” CEUs, and content-consumption.

Each role is valid if both parties are in agreement. Over the long haul, though, I’ve never had much fun being an extra pair of hands.

One of the ways that I differentiate being a consultant from a contractor is that a consultant sometimes has to tell clients what they don’t want to here. Like your physician analogy, doctors have to make the correct diagnosis, not just please their patients.