Merit vs Updates

[Malaikah]

In a future where it would be possible to cheaply upload new knowledge and skills directly to your brain in a matter of seconds or minutes... Or have multiple military grade physical upgrades giving you superhuman capabilities...
Would merit still matter?
Would you love to live in such a world?
A world in which both meritocracy and reservations are abolished.
A world where it'd all be a matter of uploading the latest skills and knowledge to your brain, getting the best physical upgrades, exploring and exploiting opportunities.

What would happen to all the scams in the educational system?
To be more specific what would happen to all the educational institutions?
As someone living in a country with very expensive higher education... as an average American... would you love to see the universities go out of business?

[Rivers]

I don't think there would be any difference.

Merit is not what you know, it's what you do with what you know.
Some of the smartest people out there are nigh unemployable, because they are dicks who can't work with others.
Same goes for physical capabilities, if you go to very physical-demanding jobs like sports or military, you'll often see below-average folks outperforming and getting leadership positions.
Same would even apply to art, although you didn't give this example. How many times have we heard opinions on people like "he/she was so talented, but threw that god's gift away, what a waste".

If anything, I think it's in a leveled playing field (where everybody has equal standings in regards to knowledge/abilities) where merit would count the most.

[on the rocks]

"I know Kung Fu."
"Show me."


If anyone could learn to do anything by simply downloading it, then really I think that absolutely destroys merit or seniority or tenure.  Then it's simply a matter of "who's warm body can I get for the cheapest to download this skill into?"
It would be terribly dystopian in my view.  Though I tend to say that a lot in Malaikah's hypothetical threads, this one is probably the most so.  A big criticism of our late capitalism, post-industrial system here is how replaceable everyone actually is.  That's what makes it feasible to close a factory in America or Europe and do that work in Vietnam or India.  Downloadable skill sets would simply take this race to the wage bottom to the extreme. 

One could roll into a dirt poor place like Nigeria and upload the skills into whatever workers you need and you're off and running.  Won't even matter if it's a politically unstable place as you could just take a few more workers and download elite security guard protocols into them and now your cheap wage, third world factory is secure.  I see nothing stopping an individual or company from basically doing what the sugar cane industry did to Hawaii.  Overthrow the monarchy and get the place annexed by a more favorable country and create their own theifdom.
I'd recommend Haiti.  It's small, it's been a failed state my entire life, pretty much, and it's close to huge consumer market in the US.  This kind of tech would let one raise their own army to conquer whatever they need to in order to protect and stabilize their production facilities.
In fact, that seems like a legit outline for a dystopian scifi novel set in the not too distant future.