From Apprenticeships to AGI: The 7 Epochs of Knowledge Work The term “knowledge worker” was popularized by Peter Drucker in 1968 to describe a massive macroeconomic shift: the transition from an industrial society powered by manual labor to one driven by intellectual capital. But how do these workers actually acquire, store, and use that knowledge? A new analysis suggests this history is best understood as a process of “cognitive externalization”—a…