Points well taken, Dave. I agree that there will continue to be a need for good designers or good teachers, but what I see with ubiquitous digital resources is that there will no longer be one authoritative voice in a field.

There will be many divergent opinions, and every learner will have to independently make sense of these. With expanding knowledge, mastery of a field is getting to be very difficult. This means that the best teachers will help people learn for themselves, a skill that is not taught well in our schools or training departments.

Preparing learners for unstructured, lifelong learning will be one of the key challenges for learning professionals. Unlearning the habits developed in industrial age classrooms ("is this on the test?") will be another.