The Body Remains: why embodied knowledge matters in the agentic age
DrKavner · x · 2026-09-25
Cerebratech's essay 'The Body Remains' argues that the most consequential thing an AI agent can't do is have a body — a structural fact, not a hardware gap better sensors will close.
- Agents operate in symbols (text, images, code are representations); humans know the world through contact — weight, resistance, the feel of a room — knowledge that can't be extracted, digitized, or transferred
- Grounded in Michael Polanyi's tacit knowledge work (The Tacit Dimension, 1966) and decades of expertise research
- As agents synthesize any text or dataset in seconds, the premium shifts from manipulation to judgment, which resists formalization
- The key human capacities in the agentic age are the ones that can't be specified in a prompt
The piece ends with a plug for the author's enterprise 'AI Audit' service.
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