CONCEPT
Socialization vs. Training
Harry Collins's 2025 formulation of the deepest structural difference between how humans acquire collective tacit knowledge—through living inside a community that holds them accountable—and how AI systems learn—through processing the textual residue of a community they never inhabit.
Learning from the internet is not the same as socialization.
Harry Collins stated this with characteristic directness in his 2025 paper on AI and the sociology of knowledge, and the distinction it draws is the most consequential claim his framework makes for the builders of artificial intelligence. Socialization is not high-bandwidth learning; it is a different kind of process entirely. A child acquires a language not by reading about language but by living inside a language-using community that corrects, praises, embarrasses, and rewards with attention the child's attempts to participate. The correction matters not because of the information it contains but because of the social consequences it carries: the child cares about getting it right because getting it wrong has consequences for belonging, identity, and the relationships that constitute the child's social world. A system trained on text cannot be embarrassed. It cannot experience the social consequences of norm violation. It has undergone no primary socialization and therefore