CONCEPT
Collective Tacit Knowledge
The third and most consequential species in Collins's taxonomy: knowledge that resides not in any individual but in the ongoing social practices of a community — and that is therefore structurally unavailable to any system trained on the community's textual output alone.
Collective tacit knowledge is the species Collins identifies as genuinely impenetrable to artificial intelligence. It is not tacit because it could not be articulated if someone tried (that is relational tacit knowledge). It is not tacit because it lives in the body (that is somatic tacit knowledge). It is tacit because it exists only in the ongoing social interactions of a community — in the norms, standards, implicit agreements, and evolving sense of what matters that constitute what it means to be a competent member of a practice. No individual possesses it in its entirety. No document captures it. It is reproduced only through the community's continuing social life, and it dissolves when that life ends.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Collins arrived at this concept through his long immersion in the gravitational wave physics community, where he observed that the knowledge required to operate