Tacit Knowledge

I have been reading Michael Polanyi’s book “The Tacit Dimension” recently as part of my graduate work. Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge emphasizes that not all knowledge can be articulated or captured through words or symbols. Instead, some aspects of knowledge are unspoken and implicit, learned through experience and practice rather than through formal instruction. According to Polanyi, tacit knowledge includes skills, ideas, and competencies that people understand intuitively and can apply without being able to explicitly explain them.

Polanyi famously summarized this concept with the phrase “we know more than we can tell.” This suggests that much of human knowledge and understanding is internalized and personal, making it difficult to transfer or communicate without direct experience.

I am convinced that this very concept is the reason that so much of AI feels alien to us. Humans know more than we can tell. AI knows what it knows. That is also the reason that online education poses such a problem for embodied knowledge. How do you direct the line of a pencil from a thousand miles away.