Much of what AI needs to learn is in workers’ heads, not on the web

In the early 20th century, a gifted engineer called Frederick Winslow Taylor embarked on an ambitious task: to extract knowledge from inside the heads of workers on America’s factory floors.

In the eyes of Taylor, who would go on to become one of the world’s first management consultants, factory workers possessed a “mass of rule-of-thumb or traditional knowledge” which had been “handed down from man to man by word of mouth” or “almost unconsciously learnt through personal observation”.

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