Michael Polanyi
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Michael Polanyi. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Michael Polanyi's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal ^ Opus
The thing I built in Trivandrum worked. Every feature, every function, every line of code the team shipped in those extraordinary days — it all worked. I described that week in You On AI as proof that the imagination-to-artifact ratio had collapsed to nearly nothing. I still believe that.
But there is a question I did not ask clearly enough, and it took a physical chemist who died the year I was born to hand me the words.
The question is not whether the output works. The question is whether the person who produced it knows anything.
Michael Polanyi spent decades pulling apart what it actually means to know something — not to possess information, not to generate a correct answer, but to understand in the way a
