CONCEPT
Somatic Tacit Knowledge
The species of tacit knowledge that resides in the body — the cyclist's balance, the surgeon's hand, the programmer's finger-memory — tacit because the body has its own form of intelligence that does not pass through conscious articulation.
Somatic tacit knowledge is the second of Collins's three species. It is knowledge the body learns through repetition, through the gradual calibration of motor systems operating below conscious awareness. Collins's position on this species is nuanced and distinguishes him from the Dreyfus tradition, which grounds AI limitations primarily in embodiment. Collins acknowledges that a disembodied system cannot possess somatic knowledge — but he argues that this is an engineering obstacle rather than a principled barrier. A sufficiently instrumented robot, equipped with appropriate sensors and actuators, could in principle approximate the body's information-processing capabilities. The real barrier to AI lies elsewhere — in collective tacit knowledge, which is social, not bodily.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction matters because it identifies where the AI debate often goes astray. Much popular discussion treats embodiment as the decisive barrier — machines cannot understand because they have no bodies. Collins's framework does not deny the