Today is Sunday April 4th, 2026, for many of you it is a holiday! Happy Easter! Today, I am reminded of the work I used to do in Knowledge Management. The idea for this post came from something I came across this morning America forgot how to make a classified nuclear warhead ingredient – Boing Boing Why is this important?
Over and again, we release people from companies and we talk about how individuals aren’t needed. Organizations do not value individual contribution unless the individual is at the top of the company and deemed “of value” at any given time. The same is true of the government and military. What is happening in the government is now an acceleration of knowledge drain and loss. In the days that my partners Matt Sutton and Wendy Woodson and I worked on KM challenges, it was pretty bad. We found that airplane manufactures, and flight trainers forgot how to construct and properly configure cockpits. We saw the record loss of medical information and knowledge for disease and warfighting. NASA couldn’t find the recipe for the heat shield and has yet to create something that is exactly as effective. Anyone eat Twinkies anymore? They are horrible now.
Institutional knowledge lost and tacit knowledge as passed on from person to person are diminished. One major risk to call out today is in our military. If we look there alone at the very basics, we see major issues. Bug juice, was basically something like Kool aid, we were taught to use it to clean drains, fixtures and rust. This isn’t listed in a manual. Being on a ship at sea, there wasn’t a lot to do in regard to electronic distractions. People spent a lot of time doing maintenance work, painting, cleaning and telling stories. Learning about what to do while on board was critical for ship safety and survival. Even a lazy sailor like me knew the basics and I knew my job inside and out. It became part of my DNA and it was engrained in me through repetition and constant attention of my seniors.
Some of what I am sharing with you was documented. As things were written, they were shared in the form of a card. When we worked on a piece of equipment, we had to read the card ahead of time. We also had someone with us until we were effectively trusted to do the work ourselves. Now, even as a young dumb sailor, we knew it was important to do this work and we did it. We were told that if we didn’t do it, the risks would be too high and would harm our shipmates and our crew.
Hey Elon ..
Alright, so I am a dinosaur, right? According to Elon and many others, we don’t need people anymore. Everything will be replaced by AI and robots in an accelerated manner. Once AI achieves AGI, it will be all over for human beings. So, you won’t need human knowledge or historical knowledge because the machines will do everything. Right?
For the record, if we sat in a room with Elon (who is literally my age) or someone else with his perspective, he would and they would have a technological and sound answer for everything. The problem with this concept is that we are not robots and while there are things we can do with technology, as long as people are involved, there will be human factors to consider. This humanity consideration is the Achillies heel of these arguments. This is the fundamental reason that Elon failed with DOGE. He sought to tackle a people problem with an engineering approach. He isn’t there any longer because he failed. Successful at making a rocket booster land itself, a car drive itself and technologies do things and stuff but NOT PEOPLE.
This is important to understand because as we all believe that technology is added to human conditions and human environments, things will get better. This is not necessarily true.
Let’s explore a little bit and I may surprise you. Let’s see.
A few years ago, I had an arrested carrier landing on the USS Truman. We walked around the ship and discussed the things that had changed and the things that stayed the same from when I was active duty. We got to the flight deck and the air control room. On top of the table, there were a bunch of little airplanes with painted nuts and bolts sitting on top of them. There was a large electronic table with a large display that had been literally covered by this rudimentary model.
What happened? Someone came up with a technological answer and spent a lot of money on replacing something that sailors didn’t want and didn’t find practical.
According to Elon, we won’t even need the sailors anymore because the planes will park and fuel themselves. They won’t even be planes; they will be drones.
All this is fine and good, except this isn’t the way things work now.
Knowledge and People
If we imagine a world where everyone is served by machines, what would we do? In a recent post, one of my favorite authors and thinkers Sam Harris discussed his perspective of machines developing cognitive abilities and the things they would be able to do. Art, science, music, the things that we believe have spark and soul may be nothing but compute.
What continues to strike me as critically important and missing is the time and space between where we are with technology and humanity vs this singularity event. Many are saying that the singularity is a timeframe not a specific date. Again, according to some of our leading thinkers, we may be at the start of the singularity.
That said, I am keenly aware of the current dummification of our youth. When we are driven to know less, we will choose to learn less. Yes, this is a generalized statement, but if we look at the way things are going, this is what is happening. Even the people who we believe are extremely smart speak in high level abstract terms about the way things are going.
As I said with respect to Elon and DOGE, he failed.
I want you to understand this in context. This conversation is about energy in Australia but this goes much deeper into a very specific and serious problem.
He doesn’t know or understand human factors.
How does this relate to knowledge management? How does this relate to AI? How does this relate to our military or companies releasing people? How does this relate to forgetting and losing important information, important KNOWLEDGE?
If the future of humanity is to evolve from human beings to artificial machines and intelligence, much of what I posting here is not required. The machines can use power from the sun, stars or some form of natural matter that will drive and power them. The dangers and risk of being human will be mitigated by the fact that we will no longer be human or not exist at all.
So, the ideas that Elon and others present about the future are leaning in on dark times for humanity. The interesting thing is that there is a dichotomy between what they say and what they do. Now, I am going to bring this home again back to the Navy, the miliary, corporate and be done. Enjoy your Easter egg hunt and unless you have drones finding your eggs for you.
People, Human and
I went to visit the USS Mount Whitney; it was a therapeutic and highly emotional trip for me. As I walked the halls of the ship, I had found maintenance tags and equipment marked and signed by me. The problem with this for me was I hadn’t done maintenance on that equipment since 1994. As I walked around, I shared with the XO observations of leaking piping, old equipment and important components unattended. There were no robots fixing things. There weren’t enough people to do the work. Somehow between 1994 and 2024 no one replaced cardboard tags or the equipment that maintained them? Does anyone on the ship know how to maintain these things?
When I asked the XO, she laughed and shrugged it off “I don’t know, I just work here.”
That is what sums up all of this. We have people telling us that we are not needed. We aren’t required. We don’t need to know how to code anything, we don’t need to know how to do anything. We just have machines replace components, parts, throw things away.
In the trades, we see this as well. The parts we use, the components, they are cheaper, made with plastics, break faster and we just replace them. This week, I had a technician look at a water heater, he said “prob needs to be replaced.” The heater works, the elements work, the board is throwing a code that he didn’t know how to interpret. I looked at the manual and the code, it is a simple fix but in his mind, replace it. If it were a robot, an AI, what would it do?
What are we seeing in the world with respect to customer experience? Steve Jobs (who I am NOT a fan of) said that we don’t and can’t start with technology, we have to start with customer experience. Now again, if there is no customer and everyone is dead and replaced by machines this doesn’t matter.
My point here is that “lessons learned” in the Navy and the DoD are critical to the current fighting force but we are training our kids to be crash test dummies.
We are releasing the people in companies that know things that are important to the company. If there was a secret sauce, it is gone or leaving.
Again, if we don’t care, it doesn’t matter. I think we care.
The other thing here to consider is the creativity of people with a little bit of current knowledge of the “space between” this knowledge loss and drain along with tech advantage. Think about the people who are leveraging AI to make millions on penny stock trades from AI. Loopholes in technological considerations not understood or thought about. Even failures due to lack of thinking.
I mean, folks, we have all this fanfare of going to the moon, but the toilet doesn’t work. The worlds smartest engineers don’t know how to engineer a toilet. Maybe they used AI?
Human
As I think about Easter and this topic, I have to wonder about G-d. What did G-d say about AI? Anything in there? Old, new, Torah? Nope… Not specifically. So, I wonder what happened? How come? Also, we all know that someone will make a connection between something that was written and AI.
Yeah, I am not going any deeper here on this. This is where we wrap up today. America forgot and is forgetting. We are losing our memory on history, science, humanities, writing, art, passion, purpose, love, brother and sisterhood, all the things that make us human beings.
Our military is in trouble because of it.
We are forgetting more than we knew almost as quickly as the icebergs are melting.
We can’t tell the difference between something fake, false and unprovable vs scientific fact. We are living in a complex paradox of fiction and falsification. The truth here is that we have always had some form of this but it is so exacerbated that we can see it in plain sight and it impacts us on a daily basis.
The short answer is technology won’t solve human problems unless our intention is to solve human problems by getting rid of humanity. Maybe the alien reptilian threat is real? You tell me. In the meantime, please realize that knowledge drain is not a good thing and replacing people with AI won’t immediately get the results that some may desire!
For those who served. Here is a little humor of explicit knowledge management on taking care of ones self while at sea.
I agree that we are not retaining knowledge and we are dumbing down our kids at the same time. We are creating a case to support AI based on our own actions (self fulling prophecy) not what we should be doing. I am reminded of the first law of thermodynamics which says Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred or converted from one form to another. Our own energy is our life form and once that is gone, the law is still in place with the universe. So, are we going to sit on the sidelines and become extinct? Or, are we going to be a part of this transfer or conversion? People need people not machines and the sooner we realize that fact the sooner we can find a way for technology to support us…not replace us. Maybe we need to change our value system where abundance is the goal instead of scarcity. Abundance is all around us, but ownership creates personal wealth and is valued more than sharing that abundance. So, maybe we have our priorities mixed up.