I disagree. The real problem is that no one wants to pay for it. The tools are certainly there to capture knowledge, but everyone's trying to cut costs so much in a desire to optimize for the present.
The technical ability to capture knowledge, particularly for craft trades like glassblowing, has existed for as long as humans have been organized into societies - it's usually a question of dedicating resources to support it.
The apprenticeship model needs a renaissance.
Think about construction. There are manual laborers with no domain knowledge that can do basic grunt work for pennies on the dollar, some with domain expertise to guide the grunts, and people that coordinate the entire construction project.
Then there's an entirely separate group of people actually working on architecture... designing the building, ensuring the structure can hold load, meets customer and legal requirements, and can be delivered on a schedule.
At my company, a good SDE1 hire is someone that's at the architecture-level... they might not be able to design a skyscraper but they can design a house. Yet 90%+ of their time will be spent putting up walls and installing plumbing.
That's ridiculous for everyone involved.
so i would say they two are in fact very similar. classroom mixed with real world use of that knowledge is better then just sitting in class the entire time with no chance to get real world usage, help and walk-throughs, until after the fact. in which case apprenticeship might be better then a degree.
As far as I can tell, automation changed manual skills two ways - by capturing and automating simple actions, it decreased the skills needed for a number of jobs but by freeing up resources up resources, it allowed some people to develop skills to a far greater depth than previously for specialized purposes such as science or art.
But capturing the skills of these remaining highly skilled individuals seems like a tough task especially since there's no incentive to build a machine to duplicate their activities - the total value of the product they isn't that high.
On the other hand, if someone figures out a way to 3d print high quality glassware, the whole field would go out the window.