Process Knowledge

The expertise of human mastering is not a set of instructions that can be written down for a machine (or even another human) to follow.  It is a collection of process knowledge - as Cory Doctorow writes: hard-won lessons that can never be adequately captured through documentation, can't be bought or sold, and can't be abstracted away or commodified.

Process knowledge is just the right touch on a finicky machine, an understanding of the upstream and downstream context, the obscure solutions at the terminus of a hundred tiny decisions made instantaneously. When an icon like Steve Albini passes away, we mourn the individual, but we also mourn the loss of their process knowledge. “They’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know.”

In Doctorow’s words, “process knowledge is squishy, contingent, and wildly important in a world filled with entropy-stricken, off-spec, and stubbornly physical things.”