Ecological Disruption of Professions

In the ecology of professions that Andrew Abbott described, the displacement of one group creates opportunities for others; disruption is the normal engine of the system's evolution. But when multiple species are displaced simultaneously—when the disrupting force attacks not one jurisdiction but the shared foundation on which every jurisdiction rests—the ecology itself becomes unstable. The stabilizing mechanisms that normally allow the system to absorb disruption and reach a new equilibrium are overwhelmed by the scale and speed of the change. Displaced practitioners cannot move laterally into adjacent jurisdictions when those jurisdictions are disrupted simultaneously. Educational institutions cannot retrain practitioners fast enough when the pace of change exceeds the pace of curriculum revision. Regulatory frameworks cannot adapt incrementally when the technology advances by orders of magnitude between iterations of the rule-making process. AI produces ecological disruption rather than jurisdictional disruption because the mechanism