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The Literacy Transition
The multi-century European process by which access to reading expanded faster than the institutional infrastructure for evaluation — the canonical historical analogue to the AI moment.
The literacy transition refers to the uneven, institutionally mediated diffusion of reading capability through European populations following the invention of movable type in the 1450s. Cipolla's Literacy and Development in the West (1969) documented the transition with archival precision, demonstrating that literacy rates correlated not with the technology's availability but with the density of surrounding institutions — schools, commercial record-keeping traditions, religious programs of Bible reading, economic incentives for numeracy. The transition is the canonical historical case through which the AI moment must be understood.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Before the printing press, writing had diffused unevenly for thousands of years. The alphabet reduced the number of symbols from several hundred to a few dozen, lowering the threshold of entry by an order of magnitude. Access expanded; comprehension did not expand at the same rate. A larger population could decode text, but the ability to evaluate what one reads — to distinguish a reliable account from motivated distortion — remained the province