Extraction of experience

There’s a moment where something shifts.

Not in the world. In how you see it.

—

I hadn’t looked for work in a long time.

Not because I didn’t need it. Just… because I hadn’t. Time stretches differently when you’re outside the loop.

So I opened the listings again. Same categories. Same language. Same promise of stability dressed up as opportunity.

But something was off.

—

The jobs weren’t jobs.

They were contracts.

Short-term. Part-time. Task-based.

And the task, more often than not, was this:

Train the system.

—

Not build it.

Not design it.

Not even really use it.

Train it.

—

Feed it examples. Correct its mistakes. Show it how to think in your field. Transfer the small, specific pieces of knowledge that took years to accumulate.

Enough repetition, and the pattern becomes clear.

You’re not being hired to do the work.

You’re being hired to teach something else how to do it instead.

—

It doesn’t feel like replacement at first.

It feels like participation.

You’re still needed. Still involved. Still part of the process.

But only in a very specific way.

As a bridge.

—

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.

The role isn’t permanent. It’s transitional.

A layer between how things used to be done…

and how they will be done without you.

—

This isn’t new.

It just looks different now.

—

There’s an old idea that technology frees people.

Less labor. More time. A slow drift toward something like a leisure society.

And sometimes it does. In small ways. At the edges.

But more often, it does something else first.

It reorganizes who controls the work.

—

There’s a pattern to it.

Take a skill that’s distributed across many people.

Break it into parts.

Standardize it.

Capture it.

Then move the decision-making somewhere else.

—

What used to live in a person…

starts to live in a system.

—

The person doesn’t disappear immediately.

They stay just long enough to translate themselves.

—

That’s the phase we’re in now.

A phase where knowledge is extracted before it is replaced.

—

You can see it across different kinds of work.

People who used to solve problems are now reviewing outputs.

People who used to make decisions are now validating suggestions.

People who built intuition over years are now asked to explain it, label it, structure it.

So it can be learned.

Not by another person.

By the system.

—

There’s a strange tension in that.

You’re contributing your knowledge.

And at the same time, reducing the need for it.

—

It’s framed as progress.

It always is.

Faster. Cheaper. More efficient.

And those things are real.

But they’re not the whole story.

—

Because efficiency doesn’t just remove effort.

It removes position.

—

And when enough positions disappear, what remains isn’t leisure.

It’s uncertainty.

—

There’s a video from the early 1980s called *Whose Progress*.

It asked a simple question:

Progress for who?

—

That question never really went away.

It just got quieter.

—

The current version sounds different.

It sounds like inevitability.

Like this is just what happens.

Like resisting it would be like resisting gravity.

—

But systems don’t evolve on their own.

They’re built. Directed. Funded. Decided.

—

Technology isn’t neutral.

It can be used to expand human capacity.

Or to centralize control.

Often, it does both at the same time.

—

The part that doesn’t get talked about is the transition.

The period where people are still needed…

just long enough to make themselves unnecessary.

—

That’s where a lot of us are now.

—

It doesn’t feel dramatic.

There’s no single moment where the switch flips.

Just a gradual narrowing.

Less autonomy. Less discretion. Less space to act.

More oversight. More structure. More systems in between.

—

Until the role changes entirely.

—

You’re still there.

But you’re not doing what you used to do.

—

The narrative says this leads somewhere better.

More freedom. More time. More options.

Maybe it will.

But right now, it feels like something else.

—

It feels like being asked to help build your own exit.

—

And once you see that…

you start asking different questions.

—

Not just:

What can this system do?

But:

Who does it remove?

Who does it benefit?

Who gets to decide?

—

Progress isn’t a direction.

It’s a choice.

—

And the question hasn’t changed.

—

Whose progress is this?

—

See you in spacetime, traveler.