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In pitting ''information'' against ''experience'' [[data modernism|this philosophy]] has systematically undermined the importance in organisations of ''those with [[ineffable]] expertise''. They are called “[[Subject matter expert|subject-matter experts]]”, which sounds venerable until you hear the exasperated tone in which it is uttered.

Over forty years the poor [[SME]] has, by a thousand literal cuts, been stripped of her status and weathered a slow but inevitable descent into the quotidian: first they came for her assistants — typists, receptionists, proof-readers, mail and fax room attendants —  then her perks — business travel, away days, taxis home — then her kit — company cars, laptops, mobile devices — then her space —  that once commodious office became communal, then lost its door, then its walls, diminished to a dedicated space along a row, and most recently has become a conditional promise of a sanitised white space in front of a [[telescreen]] somewhere in the building, should you be in early, or enough of your colleagues away sick or on holiday.  

This managed degradation of [[expert|expertise]] is a logical consequence of [[data modernism]]: human “magic” is not good, but an evil that is no longer necessary: risky, inconstant, evanescent, fragile, expensive, inconstant and, most of all, ''hard to quantify'' — and what you can’t quantify, you can’t evaluate, and what you can’t evaluate you shouldn’t, in a data-optimised world, ''do''.  

With the exploding power of information processing the range of things for which we must still rely on that [[Subject matter expert|necessary evil]] has diminished. Many [[thought leader]]s<ref>The most prominent is [[Ray Kurzweil]], though honourable mention to DB’s former CEO John Cryan and, of course, there is the redoubtable [[Richard Susskind|Suss]]. </ref> foretell it is only a matter of time until there are none left at all.