
Polanyi’s Revenge and AI’s New Romance with Tacit Knowledge
For all the promising capabilities of artificial intelligence technologies, there are reasons to tread carefully in fully placing our faith in their power to learn and act accordingly in performing the many critical tasks we are increasingly assigning to them. There’s a risk that AI may not always make the wisest of decisions, writes Subbarao Kambhampati in the online magazine of the Association of Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. The Fulton Schools professor of computer science and past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence explains the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Kambhampati says that while AI has mastered acquisition of tacit knowledge, it has significant shortcomings in acquiring explicit knowledge. He warns of potentially troublesome consequences if we rely only on AI technology without the benefit of explicit knowledge to guide its reasoning.