The Dead Zone

AI isn't destroying knowledge — it's destroying the conditions under which new knowledge is produced. The river is freezing, and the metrics all say everything is fine. A river and a frozen lake contain the same water. Only one powers a mill. The Pipeline In 1966, Michael Polanyi wrote six words that contain the entire argument: we can know more than we can tell. A cyclist cannot describe the physics of balance. A physician cannot articulate what makes one patient's cough alarming and another's benign. A senior engineer cannot specify the formula that distinguishes elegant code from merely functional code. The knowledge is real. It works. And it resists every attempt to extract it into documentation, procedures, or training data. This knowledge — tacit knowledge, in Polanyi's term — has always been transmitted the same way. Through practice. A junior analyst builds three hundred financial models badly before building one well. A resident misdiagnoses a hundred patients under supervisio