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I see the truth of what he is saying...BUT... There is another face to making knowledge tangible. It has been sought by Management to extract knowledge from Labor, so as not to be held hostage by the demands of the Old Master Craftsmen. This is an extension of the beginnings of the Factory Age. My problem is this, my basic value as a human is based in part (the professional or my "way of making a living") on the knowledge and skills I maintain within myself. It is true that I devalue, by some amount, a particular bit of knowledge or skill (call it a "knill") every time I teach or even allow others to observe any of the process by which I produce a tangible result for them. My possible difficulty is this: once my knills have been made tangible, are cataloged and marketed, my means of supporting myself become transplanted into the realm of the physical, similar to the environment my tools live in. Right now someone can steal my screwdriver and I can get another, but my knowledge of how to use a screwdriver remains with me. Once I have sold, or had stolen, or lost my knills, where do I maintain personal value?? Constantly creating new knills?? Finding markets for my old ones?? I know in reality this argument is extreme, but I am always cautious about the boundaries between what we keep in our heads and what we manifest outside the safe confines of the skull. I guess packaging and selling my knills seems somewhat like selling my memories or dreams. I know I don't lose them but finality of making a particular knill tangible leads me to want to ponder valuation carefully and on a case by case basis. Don't get me wrong, I am excited about the concept and interested in implementation, but I am also always seeing the cloud for each silver lining...

my buddy and I had a deep conversation about this one evening, if only we had fully intermediated existence I could link to it for you - one of the themes here was if we create a global market for skills you devalue the skills - that said just as you would not give a code job to a guy in india because he is cheaper than a local guy, you would not see a global market for skills become commoditized. Other dimensions of value come into play, most specifically trust. If I know a local coder does adequate work, but know nothing about the guy in india, or anyone who can 'accredit' that skill, I now am at third party accreditors (like Uni. of Delhi) to accredit his skill. Not terribly compelling. Gets into the transitivity of trust as well, had a great conflav with james choate on that one on twine... At the end of the day trust is fundamentally scarce as it is based on another fundamental scarcity, attention, which we all, being finite beings posess a finite amount of - with pharma and fitness one can improve net personal attention but you can generally not affect gross personal atttention terribly much (healthy living I suppose and advanced medical care). As attention is scarce thence trust is scarce and since skills must be accredited by direct or indirect experience there will never be the collapsing of skills into commodity pricing knill's are a little more interesting in that an algorithm can be made into infinite copies, in this case the IPR functions of *net come into play - you publish your knill and everyone who turns that knill into a liquidity event pays through to you.

one of my all-time favorites. 'specially the part about flying in the air circulator.