Polanyi knowledge and AI: why the physical and social worlds resist digitization
adeno_gothilla · reddit · 2026-09-16
A Reddit discussion on Polanyi tacit knowledge as AI's blind spot: models can be trained well on the digital world (text, code) because of vast data stores, but data is insufficient for the physical and social worlds.
- Physical world: humans hold rich tacit knowledge of objects — soft vs. hard, sticky vs. slippery, catching an egg vs. a leaf vs. a baseball. Dental assistants and personal trainers carry tacit knowledge that has never been digitized.
- Social world: tacit knowledge of individual psychology and social interaction similarly resists datafication.
The core claim: AI capability is bounded by trainable data distribution, and undigitized implicit experience remains a hard gap.
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