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What is "Lost Technology"?

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Question added by Dana Qaisi , Social Media Specialist , N/A
Date Posted: 2016/10/09
Hriday Patel
by Hriday Patel , Restaurant Operations Manager , Street Nine Restaurant L.L.C.

SOMEONE BEING LOST IN TECHNOLOGY ;) :P

Generally speaking,Lost Technologies refers to technologies that were used at some point of time to design something but is no longer used now because whatever was being designed or built using that technology is no longer being built/designed. For example, the technology used to built Pyramids in Egypt is now lost because Pyramids are no longer being built these days. Similarly  we can't build a Saturn V rocket again easily, because much of the description of the process has been lost.

 

A big part of the reason is that most technologies comprise both explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be written down but if you don't properly preserve that you can lose it, even to engineers trained to understand what had been documented. 

 

Tacit knowledge can not be written down and is stuck in people's heads as "experience" or "mentored intuitions" or "muscle memory".  It is only preserved by continually building and/or using a technology. It is only passed on by years of direct hands-on experience or person-to-person. 

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