Harry Collins — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Harry Collins — On AI. 14 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
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 of Practice
Wenger's foundational unit of social learning — a group bound together by shared domain, mutual engagement, and a collective repertoire developed over time through joint work.
Contributory Expertise
The capacity to do the work of a field — to contribute original knowledge, advance the practice, exercise the judgment that distinguishes participants from observers — and the specific competence Collins identifies as structurally unavail…
Interactional Expertise
The fluency acquired through sustained linguistic engagement with a community of practice — the ability to speak the language of expertise without being able to perform the expertise — and the precise concept that maps the genuine achievem…
Mimeomorphic and Polimorphic Action
Collins and Kusch's 1998 distinction between actions whose correctness depends on copying surface behavior and actions whose correctness depends on reading social context — the analytical axis on which the entire question of AI competence …
Relational Tacit Knowledge
The species of tacit knowledge that is tacit for contingent reasons — it could in principle be articulated but happens not to have been — and the species that AI systems handle remarkably well by extracting what practitioners know from the…
Socialization vs. Training
Collins's 2025 distinction between the social process through which humans acquire collective tacit knowledge and the statistical process through which machines extract patterns from textual output — the difference that defines what AI c…
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.
Tacit Knowledge (Polanyi-Collins Reading)
Michael Polanyi's 1966 insight that we know more than we can tell — refined by Collins into a taxonomy of three species that has become the decisive framework for understanding what AI systems can and cannot absorb from human practice.
The Laparoscopic Surgery Transition
The 1987–1997 transformation of abdominal surgery from hand-based to camera-mediated practice — Collins's paradigmatic case of technology-driven expertise transformation, and the closest historical parallel to the current AI transition in …
The Surrender
Collins's 2018 diagnosis of the cultural pathology by which humans defer to computers not because the machines are genuinely competent but because their outputs look competent — the moment when interactional fluency is mistaken for contri…
