Sergio Carracedo This article was originally published in Fika.
Today I want to share a reflection on one of those ideas I had while showering.
I was pondering the value of knowledge, its transfer, and its reuse.
The knowledge cycle is relatively simple: it is acquired (via experience or communication), assimilated, generating new knowledge, and then transferred.
For primitive humans, knowledge was acquired based on lived experiences and genetics (many “irrational” fears are the result of that genetic knowledge); without a more or less formal language, the transfer of knowledge was slow and limited to close peers, and the risk of losing that knowledge was high, as information redundancy was limited to a few individuals.
Written communication, starting with cave paintings, allowed that knowledge to be extended through time with less information loss due to interpretation.
Formal language, writing, and later the printing press, allowed for the storage and dissemination of that knowledge to every corner of the world, ensuring redundancy and immutability in its transfer.
The telegraph, radio, telephone, and later the internet, exponentially increased the speed of transmission.
And after all this rambling comes my reflection:
The more knowledge is required for daily life, the more effort it takes to transmit and, above all, to acquire it. Think about all the years you have dedicated to your education—in school, high school, university—and the lifetime during which academic knowledge is enriched by life experiences.
Now try to value all of that in terms of cost: the price of books, tuition, transportation, housing, food, everything it entails… that value is not small.
In the end, the way to recover that “investment” made by our parents and ourselves is to rent out that knowledge monthly through a job.
We make all that knowledge and experience available to the company we work for—not directly, but to perform tasks, solve problems, etc.—in exchange for a monthly “usage license” that we call a salary.
With the arrival of AI, the time needed to absorb and internalize knowledge has been greatly reduced. If we are able to capture our knowledge in a structured way (that is, knowledge acquired from others, added to our experiences and the new knowledge created), any agent could apply that knowledge by acting as the “processor” that we used to be.
And this is a major paradigm shift. Without getting into whether an AI can truly replace human labor or if it’s just another tool or lever at our disposal to make our work easier so we can focus on value, my reflection is that the price at which we sell that knowledge now should not be the same as the “monthly usage license.” By capturing that knowledge and our way of using it in writing, we would really only be needed once, in a limited way, just to transfer that knowledge and allow it to then be applied “on its own,” thus preventing us from making our investment profitable.
This should have a different type of “license.”
To use an analogy, paying for someone to make a copy of a key cannot cost the same as the key-cutting machine and the instructions on how to use it.
We must be able to value what we know and understand, because although it may seem simple or trivial, it is not—and if it seems so, it is thanks to all the previous effort and work.