The key part here is the statement "So we have nothing to feed the machine" which, as we now know, has turned out to be false. We don't need people to be able

The key part here is the statement "So we have nothing to feed the machine" which, as we now know, has turned out to be false. We don't need people to be able to tell you how and why they made that decision, we can treat the human decision-makers as a 'black box' and learn to effectively copy the behavior of that black box without necessarily needing to understand how and why it makes these decisions. We don't need textile chemists to know exactly what it is that the buyer tests when he feels a tuft of cotton if we can replicate the process of "subconsciously weighed out of years of experience" by having a machine look at enough expert decisions that amount to literal years of experience.