Facts, skills, and expertise will be increasingly commoditized, and even the smartest of us will be replaceable .

It’s easy to overlook how radical that is. Our entire society is built around knowledge as a scarce, precious resource.

Moreover, the two types of information that they respectively evolved to store have a property of cosmic significance in common: once they are physically embodied in a suitable environment, they tend to cause themselves to remain so. Such information – which I call knowledge – is very unlikely to come into existence other than through the

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