A guild is a collection of individuals who operate in the same trade in support of each other. Guild membership historically converged on artisan capabilities passed between master and apprentice and provided a means to financial security – you were a member of the guild or you weren't. The industrial revolution served to reduce the guild system to skeletal fragments as machines evolved to produce en masse the goods previously sourced by guilds. Guilds did not go away easily as their riotous membership regularly set out to reverse man's conversion to an "appendage" to the industrial machine.
When we talk about the functional silos of oil and gas, lurking in the background is the specter of the guild system where each function is a "trade" unto itself, marked by technical credentials and apprenticeship. It is conceivable then that membership of the trades would notionally reject the threat of radical technologies that could methodically displace the load previously handled by them."What will we do then?" is the reasonable question that any of us humans would posit.
When radical technology is an appendage to the trade specialist it becomes a "tool;" when it reverses those roles, it is a threat. This begs the question, how does the system that embodies the mind of the specialist become adopted? What does this mean for artificial intelligence? Is the oil and gas industry particularly vulnerable to the resistant forces of the guild mentality?