The hidden bottleneck holding back American manufacturing isn’t machines — it’s knowledge

The defining story in technology this century is how software has transformed the way we work. We now communicate, share information, and manage companies completely differently from our predecessors in 2000.

But one of the world’s biggest industries has largely bypassed the software revolution, and still runs, to a remarkable extent, on human know-how. In manufacturing, the real bottleneck is usually not the machine on the shop floor: it is the person running it, carrying years of hard-won knowledge in their head...