Author: Nita Farahany Source: https://staytuned.substack.com/cp/187629911 Published: February 10, 2026
An essay by Nita Farahany, published February 10, 2026, that uses the 2026 Milano-Cortina Olympics as a backdrop to argue that "expertise" conflates two distinct kinds of knowledge: pattern recognition, at which AI may now exceed humans in narrow domains, and embodied perception, which Farahany argues may be structurally inaccessible to disembodied systems. Farahany's position is that AI is pulling these two apart and, in doing so, forcing a more honest account of what is being valued. Full framework coverage is at Embodied Perception (Tacit Knowledge vs. Pattern Recognition).
Summary of argument
Farahany argues that the single word "expertise" has long been used for two different kinds of knowledge, and that AI is now separating them. Domains that conflate the measurable and the meaningful, she argues, will be threatened by AI, while domains that learn to separate the two will be made more honest. The essay generalizes the distinction beyond sport to "elite sports, medicine, law, and every other domain where machines are arriving," and it runs counter to the framing, common in industry messaging, that AI is replacing expertise.
Pattern recognition
Farahany describes the first kind of knowledge as matching what one sees against a large library of prior experience, a domain in which she argues AI is increasingly better than humans. She cites the Judging Support System in artistic gymnastics, which identifies roughly 2,000 elements with about 90% accuracy; the deployment of 14 8K cameras at the 2026 Milano-Cortina Olympics, which computed Ilia Malinin's airtime, landing speed, and rotation heat-maps in real time; and Herbert Simon's chess research, on which grandmasters do not think harder than novices but instead see differently, in larger meaningful chunks.
Embodied perception (tacit knowledge)
The second kind of knowledge, which Farahany argues may genuinely require a body, she illustrates with the chicken-sexer case. She recounts that the 1920s Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School trained experts to sort day-old hatchlings at 800 per hour with 98% accuracy, that the experts could not explain how they did it ("just knew"), and that formal instruction could not train others, who learned only through thousands of trials beside a master. Drawing on Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension and its claim that "we know more than we can tell," she describes experts as perceiving wholes before particulars: the chicken sexer holds, feels, smells, and integrates simultaneously. Farahany argues that AI, having no body and no felt experience, may be structurally unable to access this layer, not because of a technical limitation but because of what it is.
The two Olympic cases
Farahany grounds the distinction in two contrasting Olympic episodes. In the 2024 Paris case of Jordan Chiles, a routine score missed a tour jeté full element and a coach's inquiry came four seconds late; the element was credited, the medal was then stripped on procedural grounds, and it was restored after the Swiss Federal Supreme Court found "conclusive video evidence." Farahany argues that had AI been scoring, the element would have been credited automatically and the procedural collapse avoided, because AI is better at element-counting.
The contrasting case is Lindsey Vonn at the 2026 Milano-Cortina Olympics: at 41 years old, with a fully ruptured left ACL, she raced the Tofane downhill and crashed within seconds. Farahany frames this as the kind of event the Olympics is watched for, to witness courage and artistry rather than a body satisfying a checklist. Cameras measured her speed at impact but, in her account, could not begin to score what it meant for her to push out of the gate.
Prescription
Farahany's prescription is to let AI handle the measurements "accurately, fairly, without fatigue, and with bias we can detect and correct," and then to protect the space "where the only appropriate response is awe" — not a better checklist, but honesty about what is being celebrated. She argues that the conflation of the measurable and the meaningful in "expertise" was always a confusion that AI is now pulling apart.
Provenance
The essay names embodied perception versus pattern recognition as the underlying distinction it argues AI is forcing on every expertise-bound profession, offers the chicken-sexer case as a cognitive-science exemplar of irreducible tacit knowledge, and uses the Vonn-versus-Chiles Olympic pairing to ground the distinction in concrete cases. As an essay it is a position rather than evidence; its forecast that conflating domains will be threatened by AI while separating domains will be made more honest is Farahany's argument, not an established result.
Relationships
- authored-by: Nita Farahany
- introduces: Embodied Perception (Tacit Knowledge vs. Pattern Recognition)
- depends-on: Polanyi The Tacit Dimension; Dreyfus Mind Over Machine; Herbert Simon's chess research
- related: Expertise Framework (Autor–Thompson), Cognitive Friction (Jarovsky's parallel response), LLM Fallacy