The most important and most mysterious rule in the AI era: Polanyi's Paradox

“We know more than we can tell.”
This is a theory by philosopher Michael Polanyi, repeatedly cited by various AI experts.
AI is currently evolving at an extremely rapid pace; it can understand all the profound knowledge in human books, instantly solve complex mathematical problems, and create various forms of art, but there is one ability it does not have now and will not have in the future: tacit knowledge.
“Tacit knowledge”—it dissolves in muscle memory, intuition, and countless life experiences of trial and error.
It resists being extracted, refuses to be encoded, and cannot be standardized into textbooks, nor can it be captured and learned by AI.
The essence of AI is to consume and compute all explicit knowledge that can be spoken or encoded.
When all rules, data, theories, and routines are instantly mastered by large models, even outputting at speeds millions of times faster than humans, where is the human advantage?
It lies in those things that cannot be encoded, “can only be felt but not spoken,” such as aesthetic judgment and taste.
AI can write poetry that follows all rhetorical rules, but it cannot experience the loneliness of wandering alone on a rainy night street;
AI can exhaust all deductions of business models, but cannot muster the courage to make tough decisions in chaotic situations.
In the AI era, all skills that can be clearly expressed, step-by-step, and standardized will become cheap;
and the truly valuable ones are aesthetic judgment, taste, and intuition.
You have read ten thousand literary works, but you cannot surpass AI; however, your aesthetic sense and taste for literature are unique.
Polanyi's Paradox in the AI era gives us the greatest insight: do not try to beat machines in “calculation,” but embrace those things that cannot be calculated—“tacit knowledge.”
In this age where algorithms attempt to quantify and encode everything, cultivating your unspoken taste, intuition, and genuine life experience is our noblest privilege and most precious ability as humans.
Enhance aesthetic judgment, improve taste, and strengthen intuition.