Hipsnip

The death of the Knowledge Worker

Learning as an apprentice

It used to be that you went to a venerable master (or at least somebody close by) to learn your craft. 7-10 years would have been about normal for an apprenticeship. During that time you worked for free, toiling to fill your master’s pockets with your oafish attempts at your trade. As the days and weeks and months passed, your master would have whispered the secrets into your ear, corrected your movements and ensured that you were progressing to his satisfaction.

Once you were done your apprenticeship you would head out into the world as a Journeyman. Now, as a competent but inexperienced practitioner, you would seek out a community that needed your skills. Often, you would be able to find work with a master (usually not the one to whom you apprenticed) who might even need help with his apprentices.

Learning in this context happened as a direct result of the contact between the learner and the demonstrator. There was no third party, and no intermediary between the two. When the master died, any knowledge not already passed on to his apprentices died with him.

The fabrication of scarcity

The purpose of a guild is simple: protect the value of the knowledge that constitutes the body of the craft.

In a small village, this is easy. There is only one blacksmith, and the only way to become a blacksmith is if he likes you enough to accept you as his apprentice. When he trains you (if he trains you), you learn to reproduce his results and are not released until he is satisfied with your level of skill. Ideally, he also imparts to you the pride that will cause you to train your apprentices in a similar fashion. He can also control how many blacksmiths are trained each year simply by refusing candidates; with no other option for training, they will need to emigrate or choose another profession.

In the big city, or in any other scenario where training is readily available, this story shifts. Now, training is a commodity and people will be looking for the best “cost/amount of training” ratio they can find. This frequently results in low-quality training at low cost which only serves to put incompetent apprentices on the market. Once on the market, these individuals produce inferior quality products. However, the fact that the product is of inferior quality is secondary to the fact that it costs so much less. The problem is that now the market is less motivated to provide the more expensive, higher quality products.

To control it’s members, a guild could use threats of expulsion or black-listing that would translate to an inability to find work and, ultimately, famine. This control over the members is often presented as the same “us vs. them” mentality seen in the psychological structure of gangs, cults, and unions. This control is used to stop the “un-lawful” dissemination of information. By keeping the knowledge of how to practice their craft a closely-guarded secret, guilds achieve the same thing as DeBeers’ “buy all the world’s diamonds” strategy; the scarcity of the commodity is fabricated but quite real.

The death knell of the knowledge hoarder

Information wants to be free. Anybody attempting to sell knowledge is plundering a non-renewable natural resource and once a story is sold, it is told, re-told, modified, translated, enhanced, summarised and re-sold. But there is always a tipping point; a point beyond which it is impossible to sell a certain piece of information.

For example, try selling somebody “the secret” of the 98435th digit of pi. It won’t work very well because everybody has access to the knowledge required to obtain that digit themselves.

When we all know *how* to do something, we are no longer willing to pay to be told how to do it. Also, we will no longer pay people to *do* that thing as much as before, since we could do it ourselves. In fact, the less “secret” knowledge somebody requires to do their job, the less they get paid. The rather predictable result is that we are just this side of refusing to pay people to do anything that could be done by more than 50% of the population. Minimum-wage laws prove that without “appropriate regulation” nobody really wants to pay the kid who pumped the gas; let’s face it: I could have pumped it myself.

But as information becomes cheaper, better organized and more readily available, even the long-standing tradition of paying for “secret” knowledge is bound to come crashing down around the ears of some very surprised doctors and lawyers. As we put tools into people’s hands that allow them to bypass the providers of traditional services, we are also condemning professions to obsolescence.

The concept of a person being paid to only do one thing their entire lives hasn’t been a reality in a long time. More and more we will see accountants going home to pilot scout drones on night missions; paid by the run or by the hour. Doctors and other traditionally secretive professions will go home and post their latest techniques on the Internet, sharing their successes and their failures. Individuals will be hired based on their personality, their soft skills, their problem-solving abilities; not based on whether or not they know a secret handshake or the latest cool programming language or how to drive a semi. Experience in a field will continue to play a role in hiring but will be used as a secondary discriminator as opposed to a primary selection mechanism.

The knowledge worker is dying; long live the knowledge worker!