Reliable AI Needs to Externalize Implicit Knowledge: A Human-AI Collaboration Perspective

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of externalizing implicit knowledge through structured artifacts called Knowledge Objects to enhance AI reliability via human validation.

Contribution

It introduces Knowledge Objects as a novel method to externalize and verify implicit knowledge, addressing a key gap in current AI reliability approaches.

Findings

Knowledge Objects enable human inspection of implicit knowledge.

Externalizing implicit knowledge improves AI reliability over time.

Current verification methods focus mainly on explicit knowledge.

Abstract

This position paper argues that reliable AI requires infrastructure for human validation of implicit knowledge. AI learns from both explicit knowledge (papers, documentation, structured databases) and implicit knowledge (reasoning patterns, debugging processes, intermediate steps). Implicit knowledge remains unexternalized because documentation cost exceeds perceived value -- yet AI learns from it indiscriminately, acquiring both beneficial patterns and harmful biases. Current reliability methods can only verify explicit knowledge against sources, creating a fundamental gap: the most valuable AI capabilities (reasoning, judgment, intuition) are precisely those we cannot verify. We propose Knowledge Objects (KOs) -- structured artifacts that externalize implicit knowledge into forms humans can inspect, verify, and endorse. KOs transform verification economics: what was previously too costly to verify becomes feasible, enabling accumulated human validation to improve reliability over time.