On Gutenberg and GPT

When we learned about the printing press, it probably went something like this: Johannes Gutenberg’s invention kickstarted an information revolution and, most directly, the pamphlet-powered Protestant Reformation, which led us out of the Dark Ages into the Enlightenment.

The history seems slightly obvious — boring, even.

But this linear narrative of the printing press — a smooth crescendo from medieval Europe to the scientific revolution — is a case of revisionist history. It gets two big things wrong.

First, we underestimate the printing press’s impact. Before its advent, disseminating knowledge with scribes was akin to a very slow-moving, leaky bucket; most information wasn’t written down and what was would gradually get lost in translation. With the printing press, knowledge could finally be preserved. This invention led to more than just a bunch of people reading new books – for the first time, knowledge could compound and scale effectively.

These changes in information flow produced correspondingly large shocks to the previous world order. By enabling the Protestant Reformation, the dominant European power and single source of truth, the Catholic Church, lost its monopoly on moral authority within one century. And the worldview of a continent was rocked by publications on the work of Copernicus, who placed the Sun, not the Earth (nor the human), at the center of the universe.

To illustrate the magnitude of these changes, just imagine the United States, or the European Union, crumbling within a short century — or imagine an encounter with aliens fundamentally shattering our idea of the universe. That is what followed the advent of the printing press.

Second, besides the importance of the innovation, we forget about the negative consequences the printing press brought. Many, including Martin Luther, the seminal leader of the Protestant Reformation himself, worried the printing press would destroy society by allowing misinformation, or — in 15th-century jargon — the message of the antichrist, to spread. And indeed, the printing press was used to spread falsehoods as much as enlightened truth, which resulted in unprecedented confusion for society.

Put simply, the age of the printing press was hardly the fairy tale we often tell about it. For those living through it, this was a period of drastic, confusing, and scary change; it destabilized a continent.

This post-disruption messiness was hardly unique to the printing press; it followed many great inventions. Even the Arabic numerals we use today were banned for centuries in favor of Roman numerals because of their controversial concept of zero — of “nothingness.”

We see a pattern emerge: Discomfort accompanies progress. In many ways, it is a great proxy for innovation. Counterintuitively, comfort should be worrisome because it might be a sign of stagnation.

It is important to relearn this fact after having airbrushed the hardship and discomfort out of the history of progress. If we don’t, we risk seeing our current challenges as unique and unsurmountable.

In the past few decades, for example, the proliferation of the internet — and, now, the first inning of artificial intelligence — has been challenging and destabilizing. Between Big Tech platforms exercising quasi-political power over nation-states, social media’s effect on teenagers, disinformation campaigns at home and abroad, and recent fears about generative AI’s effect on creative work, our institutions and societal fabric are being put under the pressure of information accelerationism.

In the context of previous inventions like the printing press, we understand that the problems we are facing are a necessary companion to innovation. They are part of the story of progress.

Additionally, there are two more lessons we can draw from the history of the printing press. First, if the advance of the internet or artificial intelligence is anything close to the proliferation of print — which we believe to be true — then we should expect a similar order of magnitude of societal change. And the history of the printing press tells us that these shifts are drastic and ultimately positive, yet hard to piece together as you’re living through them. The only piece you do feel in the moment is the friction.

Second, the need for action. While we must be confident, it is equally important not to succumb to blind techno-optimism. In fact, it is essential for us to worry. Only through worrying will we take the necessary steps to check against the negative excesses of the technologies we create. This was true for the printing press; academics worried about the technology’s potential for misinformation, for example, invented the index and the bibliography in response. Many similar stories exist of these “productive worriers” shaping the trajectory of once-unchecked technologies.

Gutenberg invented the printing press almost six centuries ago. Today, GPT shows us what the next chapter of the journey he has set us on can look like. To continue to navigate new technologies successfully, we need to learn from our past, but many of our discussions today suffer from an essentialized history of technology – either it was all bad and we are doomed, or it was a straight, smooth line toward progress.

Since the technologies we are developing are increasingly more powerful, both views are dangerous. Blind optimism and doomsday pessimism intersect in inaction. But if we are skeptically optimistic, and embrace the challenges new technologies present us with, we will be able to take advantage of our new tools to create a better future.

Roman C. Ugarte ’24 is an Applied Math in Economics concentrator in Eliot House. K. Oskar Schulz ’22 is currently on leave founding a startup in New York City. Their column, “Under-indexed,” runs on alternate Wednesdays.