The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself.
It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on Apple's "Crush" commercial), but especially now among the hustlers of "AI." The argument goes: just as Gutenberg's invention freed the minds of fettered and unlettered medieval Europeans, launching them into modernity, so "artificial intelligence" technology will elevate humanity to a higher plane of being. Forget about the ecological costs, forget about the expropriated labor, forget about the surveillance, forget about the reduction of social interaction and negotiation to calculation and prediction from the lowest common denominator of number crunched text. What matters is that history is a series of stages of revolutions, in which a sequence of technologies lead humans toward exceeding our own limitations. One day we will be Multivac.
It's not difficult to dispute this lazy, analogic use of history. Lemme see if I can excavate the formula from the primordial part of my brain that retains stuff I learned for the SAT
printing press: democratized knowledge :: "artificial intelligence" : ???
The consequence on the other side of "AI" is rarely stated in concrete terms. Usually it's enough to say that because "the printing press democratized knowledge," AI will have a similarly beneficial effect. We see Sam Altman saying this and anyone acting as his surrogate now that they've bought it: whether it's Randy Weingarten justifying selling out public school teachers and students or start-ups crowing that they’re about to democratize music production.
This phrase is everywhere. But while those opposed to the insertion of "AI" into every sector of life dispute that a text extrusion machine and racist pile of linear algebra can achieve anything so wonderful as its proponents use this analogy to proclaim, I have yet to see anyone in this context questioning the first formula in that analogy.
So. To the phrase. "The printing press democratized knowledge."
Here's how I teach slogans that masquerade as history.
What, exactly are we talking about here? Is it the mechanical process of replicating by means of impressing an image or letter on to a surface? Because if that's the case, then the cylinder seals of ancient Mesopotamia "democratized knowledge." Forget about woodblock printing from Asia in the 8th century, humanity has had printed words for literally thousands of years.
So if it's not the mechanical process, is it the machine, the technology of the printing press and movable type itself? Well for that to be the case, then we would have to start talking about a whole host of other things because printed words on paper don't do anything sitting in a room by themselves unless you believe in magic. How about the production of paper, for one? But the words printed on those sheets of paper, they would have to go somewhere to be sold, so we probably want to talk about transportation infrastructure--roads, waterways, and all the vehicles and conveyances that trundled and floated over them. Once those words pressed on to paper ended up at their destinations, it wouldn't be very good at all if they didn't have literate people to read them. And it would have been real weird for some German businessmen to sink an absurd amount of money into creating a product for which there was no market. They had to learn to read from somewhere, and it wasn't a hulking machine in Mainz that immaculately birthed a literate customer base.
OK, OK, one says, but you know what I mean. The printing press MADE MORE BOOKS. It gave us SCALE!
But is that "democratization"? Democracy sounds so nice. I love it! But is that the appropriate term here? Democratization describes a political process of expanding the franchise and availing political representation to more and more people (the "demos"). We still need more of it here in the United States. We would do well to assist the process of democratization to the residents of Puerto Rico and Washington DC and to the formerly incarcerated and to those removed from voter rolls due to clerical error and “clerical error.” Clearly this literal definition is not what anyone means when they claim that the printing press achieved it, because the printing press has nothing to do with representative government.
What they mean here is that the printing press produced more units of certain class of commodity (words on paper) and made that commodity more affordable. As a result more people could own this commodity. Is this commodity "knowledge"? We'll get there in a sec. The issue is whether allowing more people to buy something is a democratizing process. I'm going to let people fill in a blank here because I will bet that you can think of things--some very terrible, violent things--that, when owned by more and more people actually thwart democracy.
Finally, to knowledge. It's ridiculous that I should try to dispatch the complexity of what "knowledge" is in three sentences, which is about the length of a paragraph that people are willing to stick with on a screen. I will simply say here that equating words pressed on to paper with knowledge both restricts what knowledge itself is and the vast number of channels by which humanity has acquired it over millennia (I, for one, didn't learn how to rollerblade by being taught from words pressed on paper), at the same time that it oversells what words on paper are (sure, everything is "knowledge," but when people use that word, they're generally dressing up whatever it is they're calling "knowledge" and I can assure you that a lot of what the printing press printed at scale was bullshit).
No, I don't hate the printing press. What I object to is the use of slogans based on fairy tales. But "the printing press democratized knowledge" is not just a fairy tale; when you actually think about the words being used next to one another, they don't make the sense they are purported to make.
Yes, it’s important to dispute on its own terms that “AI” will achieve all the glorious things its boosters promise. But it’s also important to understand that the very historical example that is cited as proof by means of the precedent it set is itself a lie, largely because it makes no damned sense.