PERSON
Michael Polanyi
The Hungarian-British physical chemist who became a philosopher of knowledge, coining the phrase “we can know more than we can tell” and giving artificial intelligence the deepest pre-computational diagnosis of both its long failure and its eventual success.
There is a sentence Michael Polanyi wrote in 1966 that the engineers of artificial intelligence spent fifty years trying to disprove, and then, almost by accident, proved instead. The sentence opens The Tacit Dimension: “we can know more than we can tell.” He was not speaking loosely. He was pointing at a precise structural feature of skilled human performance: that the deepest kind of knowing—recognizing a face, judging that an experiment has gone wrong, hearing that a sentence is off—runs ahead of our capacity to articulate it. The expert cannot write down the rules she follows because the knowledge was never in the form of rules. For most of the twentieth century this was a curiosity for philosophers. In the twenty-first it became the hinge on which an entire technology turned. Symbolic AI bet everything on the opposite premise: that intelligence is the rule-governed manipulation of explicit symbols, that you could interview the experts, extract their knowledge