Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

What I worry a lot more instead is how knowledge of manufacturing and engineering could be lost due to our greed.

Typical scenario: Industry I is not doing fine in country C (i.e. the fund managers are not happy about lack of growth of the public companies in this sector) due to reasons R1, R2, ..., Rn. Then management decided to outsource and eventually dismantle the factories to "globalize" it. Knowledge retained by the older generation of engineers, technicians and workers were completely lost when they passed away.

> Knowledge retained by the older generation of engineers, technicians and workers were completely lost when they passed away.

That has happened quite often in the past [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_inventions

Only three real examples on that page.

Petrification: no real loss to society but I will concede that this appears to be an example of actual loss of "progress". Very few people are saying "oh diety, if only I could preserve this animal with perfect color and texture (but discarding all other characteristics).

Greek fire: the history of when this knowledge was lost is unclear. Also it was intentionally kept secret. Certainly we have functionally similar tech now. I'll give 50% credit.

Panjagan: We don't even know if this was a weapon or a technique? Everything about this is incredibly vague.

In summary, this has happened approximately 1.5 times in the past. Not "quite often".

That list doesn't seem exhaustive in the least. A modern example is Fogbank, a classified nuclear weapons material that we recently had to reverse engineer to successfully rebuild certain warheads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

Edit: I see someone beat me to the punch with Fogbank. For another example, look to the F1 rocket engine that took us to the moon. Despite having the actual engineering documents, we just don't have the manufacturing skill to rebuild one: https://apollo11space.com/why-cant-we-remake-the-rocketdyne-...

There is another one where they had to recall retirees to restart Stinger Missile production.

The F1 is particularly interesting, because if we'd undergone a program in 1985, we probably could have restarted production, maybe even 1995 - but every decade another n% of the engineering knowhow sluffed off into the permanent dirt nap until there wasnt enough left.

Another recent example was when Jay Leno had a new heat exchanger made for his Chrysler Turbine car, and they were able to call some retirees in to help make a new one.

And that's why the US is constantly at war in one theatre or the other. It's incredibly expensive to keep production lines going - but it's vital because if you don't, you can't scale production up at a moment's notice.

Us Europeans learned that lesson the hard way three years ago and we haven't made much progress ever since the first Russian boot set foot on Ukrainian soil. 100k artillery shells don't sound like much of a thing... but apparently it is.