A textile worker folds an apron in four seconds. Ask her how she does it. She will struggle to explain. Her hands know. She may not be able to put it into words.
This week, we reported how, in India, workers film their movements with a camera on their heads, for a few dollars an hour. Their footage is used to teach robots to do their jobs. Many of them did not know.
Which raises a strange and very old question: who owns a skill?
The stopwatch, then the camera
This is not the first time someone has tried to capture the knowledge held in the hands.
In the early 20th century, an American engineer, Frederick Taylor, stationed himself in workshops with a stopwatch. He measured every movement the workers made, broke it down, optimised it, then wrote it into a procedure that anyone could follow. In 1911 he published his "principles of scientific management".
The skill, which had lived in the head and hands of the experienced worker, now passed into the engineer's manual. The worker became replaceable. Charlie Chaplin would satirise this in 1936 in Modern Times.
A century later, the camera has replaced the stopwatch. And the robot replaces the manual.
In 1966, the philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi gave a name to what the worker cannot explain: tacit knowledge. It is knowledge we possess without being able to put it into words, like riding a bike, recognising a face in a crowd, or sensing that bread dough is ready. For a long time, this kind of knowledge seemed impossible to pass on except through apprenticeship, from person to person. The cameras on the heads of the Indian workers are an attempt to capture it directly, without going through words.
Knowledge without an owner
The law protects works, through copyright, and inventions, through patents. But a trade's movement is neither. No one owns the way to fold an apron.
Or rather: as long as that knowledge stays in the worker's hands, it is hers, by force of circumstance. No one can take it from her. As soon as it is filmed, cut up and sold, it changes hands. And the value goes to the one who recorded it, not to the one who learned it over years.
The other side of the argument
We should be honest: skills have always circulated. Apprentices learned them from their masters, manuals spread them, machines absorbed them. Without that, there would be neither technical progress nor a rising standard of living.
And one of the workers interviewed by NPR says it herself: she hopes that one day, a robot will do her housework for her. Freeing people from gruelling tasks is nothing scandalous.
What makes the difference
The difference between passing on and taking may come down to two simple things.
Knowing. An apprentice knows he is learning, a master knows he is teaching. A worker who is filmed without being told why is passing on nothing: she is being used.
Sharing. If knowledge accumulated over years one day makes it possible to build robots worth fortunes, it seems fair that those who supplied it get a share, and not just 2.60 dollars an hour.
We already asked this question about newspapers that want to make AI pay. Whether it is articles or gestures, it is always the same: who has the right to use other people's work, and on what terms?
What we take away
A gesture learned over twenty years can be filmed in an hour. What cannot be filmed is the fairness of the exchange.
The knowledge in our hands was long our last line of defence. If it becomes a raw material like any other, at the very least those who supply it will need to know, and to benefit from it.