Danny Ayers found an entertaining quote on delegation by Dan Connolly
formalizing knowledge allows us to delegate tasks to the machine
This is one of those hidden fears about knowledge management and expert systems before that. If you figure out how to "extract" everything I know, then I will become redundant.
But note the tone of this quote and the original note from Connolly. He's thinking of this as a good thing. At some point repetitive tasks become boring, even if they do require a decent background knowledge to do them well. Freeing knowledge workers to do interesting (and unusual) work also requires that they spend time understanding (formalizing) what they know and how that applies in the situation at hand. This allows delegation to the machine, and if done well, can create the right feedback mechanism so that the "machine" doesn't attempt to operate outside what it has been taught.